The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for inscriptions older than around 1050 BC, is the oldest verified alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet is an abjad[3] consisting of 22 letters, all consonants, withmatres lectionis used for some vowels in certain late varieties. It was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia.

As the letters were originally incised with a stylus, most of the shapes are angular and straight, although more cursive versions are increasingly attested in later times, culminating in the Neo-Punic alphabet of Roman-era North Africa. Phoenician was usually written from right to left, although there are some texts written in boustrophedon.

The Phoenician alphabet is a direct continuation of the "Proto-Canaanite" script of the Bronze Age collapse period. The so-called Ahiram epitaph, from about 1200 BC, engraved on the sarcophagus of king Ahiram in Byblos, Lebanon, one of five known Byblian royal inscriptions, shows essentially the fully developed Phoenician script,[6] although the name "Phoenician" is by convention given to inscriptions beginning in the mid 11th century BC.[7]

Phoenician had long-term effects on the social structures of the civilizations that came in contact with it. Its simplicity not only allowed it to be used in multiple languages, but it also allowed the common people to learn how to write. This upset the long-standing status of writing systems only being learned and employed by members of the royal and religious hierarchies of society, who used writing as an instrument of power to control access to information by the larger population.[11] The appearance of Phoenician disintegrated many of these class divisions, although many Middle Eastern kingdoms, such as Assyria, Babylonia and Adiabene, would continue to use cuneiform for legal and liturgical matters well into the Common Era.

The Phoenician alphabet was first uncovered in the 17th century, but up to the 19th century its origin was unknown. It was at first believed that the script was a direct variation of Egyptian hieroglyphs.[12] This idea was especially popular due to the recent decipherment of hieroglyphs. However, scholars could not find any link between the two writing systems, nor to hieratic or cuneiform. The theories of independent creation ranged from the idea of a single man conceiving it, to the Hyksos people forming it from corrupt Egyptian.[13] This latter notion is reminiscent of the eventual discovery that the proto-Sinaitic alphabet was inspired by the model of hieroglyphs.

The Phoenician letter forms shown here are idealized: actual Phoenician writing was cruder and more variable in appearance. There were also significant variations in Phoenician letter forms by era and region.

When alphabetic writing began in Greece, the letter forms used were similar but not identical to the Phoenician ones and vowels were added because the Phoenician alphabet did not contain any vowels. There were also distinct variants of the writing system in different parts of Greece, primarily in how those Phoenician characters that did not have an exact match to Greek sounds were used. The Ionic variant evolved into the standard Greek alphabet, and the Cumae variant into the Latin alphabet, which accounts for many of the differences between the two. Occasionally, Phoenician used a short stroke or dot symbol as a word separator.[14]

The chart shows the graphical evolution of Phoenician letter forms into other alphabets. The sound values often changed significantly, both during the initial creation of new alphabets and from pronunciation changes of languages using the alphabets over time.

Phoenician used a system of acrophony to name letters. The names of the letters are essentially the same as in its parental scripts, which are in turn derived from the word values of the original hieroglyph for each letter.[16] The original word was translated from Egyptian into its equivalent form in the Semitic language, and then the initial sound of the translated word became the letter's value.[17]

According to a 1904 theory by Theodor Nöldeke, some of the letter names were changed in Phoenician from the Proto-Canaanite script.[dubious – discuss] This includes:

gaml "throwing stick" to gimel "camel"

digg "fish" to dalet "door"

hll "jubilation" to he "window"

ziqq "manacle" to zayin "weapon"

naḥš "snake" to nun "fish"

piʾt "corner" to pe "mouth"

šimš "sun" to šin "tooth"

Yigael Yadin (1963) went to great lengths to prove that they actually were tools of war, similar to the original drawings.[18]

The Phoenician numeral system consisted of separate symbols for 1, 10, 20, and 100. The sign for 1 was a simple vertical stroke (𐤖). Other numbers up to 9 were formed by adding the appropriate number of such strokes, arranged in groups of three. The symbol for 10 was a horizontal line or tack (𐤗‬). The sign for 20 (𐤘) could come in different glyph variants, one of them being a combination of two 10-tacks, approximately Z-shaped. Larger multiples of ten were formed by grouping the appropriate number of 20s and 10s. There existed several glyph variants for 100 (𐤙). The 100 symbol could be combined with a preceding numeral in a multiplicatory way, e.g. the combination of "4" and "100" yielded 400.[19] Their system did not contain a numeral zero.[20]

The Phoenician alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard in July 2006 with the release of version 5.0. An alternative proposal to handle it as a font variation of Hebrew was turned down. (See PDF summary.)

The Unicode block for Phoenician is U+10900–U+1091F. It is intended for the representation of text in Palaeo-Hebrew, Archaic Phoenician, Phoenician, Early Aramaic, Late Phoenician cursive, Phoenician papyri, Siloam Hebrew, Hebrew seals, Ammonite, Moabite, and Punic.

The Aramaic alphabet, used to write Aramaic, is another descendant of Phoenician. Aramaic, being the lingua franca of the Middle East, was widely adopted. It later split off (due to power/political borders) into a number of related alphabets, including Hebrew, Syriac, and Nabataean, the latter of which in, its cursive form, became an ancestor of the Arabic alphabet that is currently used in Arabic-speaking countries from North Africa through the Levant to Iraq and the Persian Gulf region, as well as in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and other countries.

The Sogdian alphabet, a descendant of Phoenician via Syriac, is an ancestor of the Old Uyghur, which in turn is an ancestor of the Mongolian and Manchu alphabets, the former of which is still in use and the latter of which survives as the Xibe script.

The Coptic alphabet, still used in Egypt for writing the Christian liturgical language Coptic (descended from Ancient Egyptian), is mostly based on the Greek alphabet, but with a few additional letters for sounds not in Greek at the time. Those additional letters are based on Demotic script.

According to Herodotus,[24] the Phoenician prince Cadmus was accredited with the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet—phoinikeia grammata, "Phoenician letters"—to the Greeks, who adapted it to form their Greek alphabet, which was later introduced to the rest of Europe. Herodotus estimates that Cadmus lived sixteen hundred years before his time, or around 2000 BC, and claims that the Greeks did not know of the Phoenician alphabet before Cadmus.[25] However, Herodotus's writings are not used as a standard source by contemporary historians.
The Greek alphabet is derived from the Phoenician alphabet.[26] The phonology of Greek being different from that of Phoenician, the Greeks modified the Phoenician script to better suit their language. It was possibly more important in Greek to write out vowel sounds: Phoenician being a Semitic language, words were based on consonantal roots that permitted extensive removal of vowels without loss of meaning, a feature absent in the Indo-European Greek. (Or perhaps, the Phoenicians were simply following the lead of the Egyptians, who never wrote vowels. After all, Akkadiancuneiform, which wrote a related Semitic language, always indicated vowels.) In any case, the Greeks adapted the signs of the Phoenician consonants not present in Greek; each such name was shorn of its leading sound, and the sign took the value of the now leading vowel. For example, ʾāleph, which designated a glottal stop in Phoenician, was re-purposed to represent the vowel /a/; he became /e/, ḥet became /eː/ (a long vowel), ʿayin became /o/ (because the pharyngeality altered the following vowel), while the two semi-consonants wau and yod became the corresponding high vowels, /u/ and /i/. (Some dialects of Greek, which did possess /h/ and /w/, continued to use the Phoenician letters for those consonants as well.)

The Latin alphabet was derived from Old Italic (originally a form of the Greek alphabet), used for Etruscan and other languages. The origin of the Runic alphabet is disputed, and the main theories are that it evolved either from the Latin alphabet itself, some early Old Italic alphabet via the Alpine scripts or the Greek alphabet. Despite this debate, the Runic alphabet is clearly derived from one or more scripts that ultimately trace their roots back to the Phoenician alphabet.[26][27]

Many Western scholars believe that the Brahmi script of India and the subsequent Indic alphabets are also derived from the Aramaic script, which would make Phoenician the ancestor of virtually every alphabetic writing system in use today.[28]

^Yigael Yadin, The Art of Warfare in Biblical Lands. McGraw-Hill, 1963. The Samech - a quick war ladder, later to become the '$' dollar sign drawing the three internal lines quickly. The 'Z' shaped Zayin - an ancient boomerang used for hunting. The 'H' shaped Het - mammoth tuffs.

1.
Abjad
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An abjad is a type of writing system where each symbol stands for a consonant, leaving the reader to supply the appropriate vowel. The name abjad is derived from pronouncing the first letters of the Arabic alphabet in order, the ordering of Arabic letters used to match that of the older Hebrew, Phoenician and Semitic alphabets, ʾ b g d. According to the formulations of Daniels, abjads differ from alphabets in that only consonants, abugidas mark the vowels with a diacritic, a minor attachment to the letter, or a standalone glyph. Some abugidas use a symbol to suppress the inherent vowel so that the consonant alone can be properly represented. In a syllabary, a grapheme denotes a syllable, that is. This caused fatal effects on terminology in general and especially in Semitic philology, the first abjad to gain widespread usage was the Phoenician abjad. Unlike other contemporary scripts, such as cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs and this made the script easy to learn, and seafaring Phoenician merchants took the script wherever they went. Phoenician gave rise to a number of new writing systems, including the Greek alphabet and Aramaic, the Greek alphabet evolved into the modern western alphabets, such as Latin and Cyrillic, while Aramaic became the ancestor of many modern abjads and abugidas of Asia. Impure abjads have characters for vowels, optional vowel diacritics. The term pure abjad refers to scripts entirely lacking in vowel indicators and this practice was at first rare and limited in scope, but it became increasingly common and more developed in later times. In the 9th century BC, the Greeks adapted the Phoenician script for use in their own language, the phonetic structure of the Greek language created too many ambiguities when the vowels went unrepresented, so the script was modified. They did not need letters for the sounds represented by aleph, he, heth or ayin. The letters waw and yod were also adapted into vowel signs, along with he, the major innovation of Greek was to dedicate these symbols exclusively and unambiguously to vowel sounds that could be combined arbitrarily with consonants. Abugidas developed along a different route. The basic consonantal symbol was considered to have an inherent a vowel sound, hooks or short lines attached to various parts of the basic letter modify the vowel. In this way, the South Arabian alphabet evolved into the Geez alphabet between the 5th century BC and the 5th century AD, similarly, around the 3rd century BC, the Brāhmī script developed. The other major family of abugidas, Canadian Aboriginal syllabics, was developed in the 1840s by missionary and linguist James Evans for the Cree. Evans used features of Devanagari script and Pitman shorthand to create his initial abugida, later in the 19th century, other missionaries adapted Evans system to other Canadian aboriginal languages

2.
Phoenician language
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Phoenician was a language originally spoken in the coastal region then called Canaan in Phoenician, Arabic, Greek, and Aramaic, Phoenicia in Greek and Latin, and Pūt in the Egyptian language. It is a part of the Canaanite subgroup of the Northwest Semitic languages, other members of the family are Hebrew, Ammonite, Moabite and Edomite. The area where Phoenician was spoken includes modern-day Lebanon, coastal Syria, coastal northern Israel, parts of Cyprus and, at least as a prestige language, some adjacent areas of Anatolia. Phoenician, together with Punic, is known from approximately 10,000 surviving inscriptions. In addition to their inscriptions, the Phoenicians are believed to have left numerous other types of written sources. In their cities by the sea, the air and soil were damp, thus disappeared the literature of the people who taught a large portion of the earth’s population to write. The only written documents of Phoenicians and Carthaginians are monumental inscriptions on stone, a few letters or notes on pieces of broken pottery. Thus, no Tyrian primary sources dating from Hiram I’s time are available, roman authors, such as Sallust, allude to some books written in the Punic language, but none have survived except occasionally in translation or in snippets. Even as late as 1837 only 70 Phoenician inscriptions were known to scholars and these were compiled in Wilhelm Geseniuss Scripturae linguaeque Phoeniciae monumenta, which comprised all that was known of Phoenician by scholars at that time. Basically, its core consists of the edition, or re-edition of 70 Phoenician. However, just to note the advances made in the century, it is noteworthy that Gesenius’ precursor Hamaker. On the other hand only 30 years later the amount of Phoenician inscribed monuments had grown so enormously that Schröder in his compendium Die phönizische Sprache. Entwurf einer Grammatik nebst Sprach- und Schriftproben of 1869 could state that Gesenius knew only a quarter of the material Schröder had at hand himself, the Phoenicians were the first state-level society to make extensive use of the Semitic alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet is the oldest verified consonantal alphabet, or abjad and it has become conventional to refer to the script as Proto-Canaanite until the mid-11th century BCE, when it is first attested on inscribed bronze arrowheads, and as Phoenician only after 1050 BCE. The Phoenician phonetic alphabet is believed to be at least the partial ancestor of almost all modern alphabets. From a traditional perspective, Phoenician was a variety of the Canaanite languages. Through their maritime trade, the Phoenicians spread the use of the alphabet to North Africa and Europe, later, the Etruscans adopted a modified version for their own use, which, in turn, was modified and adopted by the Romans and became the Latin alphabet. Carthaginian colonisation spread Phoenician to the western Mediterranean, where the distinct Punic language developed, Punic also died out, although it seems to have survived slightly longer than the original Phoenician, perhaps into the fifth century CE

3.
Egyptian hieroglyphs
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Egyptian hieroglyphs were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt. It combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with a total of some 1,000 distinct characters, cursive hieroglyphs were used for religious literature on papyrus and wood. The later hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts are derived from hieroglyphic writing, the writing system continued to be used throughout the Late Period, as well as the Persian and Ptolemaic periods. Late survivals of hieroglyphic use are found well into the Roman period, with the closing of pagan temples in the 5th century, knowledge of hieroglyphic writing was lost, and the script remained undeciphered throughout the medieval and early modern period. The decipherment of hieroglyphs would only be solved in the 1820s by Jean-François Champollion, the word hieroglyph comes from the Greek adjective ἱερογλυφικός, a compound of ἱερός and γλύφω, supposedly a calque of an Egyptian phrase mdw·w-nṯr gods words. The glyphs themselves were called τὰ ἱερογλυφικὰ γράμματα the sacred engraved letters, the word hieroglyph has become a noun in English, standing for an individual hieroglyphic character. As used in the sentence, the word hieroglyphic is an adjective. Hieroglyphs emerged from the artistic traditions of Egypt. For example, symbols on Gerzean pottery from c.4000 BC have been argued to resemble hieroglyphic writing, proto-hieroglyphic symbol systems develop in the second half of the 4th millennium BC, such as the clay labels of a Predynastic ruler called Scorpion I recovered at Abydos in 1998. The first full sentence written in hieroglyphs so far discovered was found on a seal found in the tomb of Seth-Peribsen at Umm el-Qaab. There are around 800 hieroglyphs dating back to the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, by the Greco-Roman period, there are more than 5,000. However, given the lack of evidence, no definitive determination has been made as to the origin of hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt. Since the 1990s, and discoveries such as the Abydos glyphs, as writing developed and became more widespread among the Egyptian people, simplified glyph forms developed, resulting in the hieratic and demotic scripts. These variants were more suited than hieroglyphs for use on papyrus. Hieroglyphic writing was not, however, eclipsed, but existed alongside the other forms, especially in monumental, the Rosetta Stone contains three parallel scripts – hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek. Hieroglyphs continued to be used under Persian rule, and after Alexander the Greats conquest of Egypt, during the ensuing Ptolemaic and Roman periods. It appears that the quality of comments from Greek and Roman writers about hieroglyphs came about, at least in part. Some believed that hieroglyphs may have functioned as a way to distinguish true Egyptians from some of the foreign conquerors, another reason may be the refusal to tackle a foreign culture on its own terms, which characterized Greco-Roman approaches to Egyptian culture generally

4.
Proto-Sinaitic script
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It is also referred to as Sinaitic, Proto-Canaanite, Old Canaanite, and Canaanite. The earliest Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions are dated to between the mid-19th and the mid-16th century BC. The principal debate is between an early date, around 1850 BC, and a date, around 1550 BC. The choice of one or the other date decides whether it is proto-Sinaitic or proto-Canaanite, the so-called Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions were discovered in the winter of 1904–1905 in Sinai by Hilda and Flinders Petrie. The Wadi el-Hol inscriptions strongly suggest a date of development of Proto-Sinaitic writing from the mid-19th to 18th centuries BC, the Sinai inscriptions are best known from carved graffiti and votive texts from a mountain in the Sinai called Serabit el-Khadim and its temple to the Egyptian goddess Hathor. The mountain contained turquoise mines which were visited by repeated expeditions over 800 years, many of the workers and officials were from the Nile Delta, and included large numbers of Canaanites who had been allowed to settle the eastern Delta. The date of the inscriptions is placed in the 17th or 16th century BC. Four inscriptions have been found in the temple, on two small statues and on either side of a small stone sphinx. They are crudely done, suggesting that the workers who made them were illiterate apart from this script and they are all very short, most consisting of only a couple of letters, and may have been written by Canaanite caravaners or soldiers from Egypt. They sometimes go by the name Proto-Canaanite, although the term Proto-Canaanite is also applied to early Phoenician or Hebrew inscriptions, the Wadi el-Hol inscriptions were carved on the stone sides of an ancient high-desert military and trade road linking Thebes and Abydos, in the heart of literate Egypt. They are in a wadi in the Qena bend of the Nile, 25°57′N 32°25′E, among dozens of hieratic and hieroglyphic inscriptions. If the latter, h1 and h2 may be graphic variants rather than different consonants, some scholars think that the רב rb at the beginning of Inscription 1 is likely rebbe, and that the אל ʾl at the end of Inscription 2 is likely ʾel god. Brian Colless has published a translation of the text, in some of the signs are treated as logograms or rebuses Excellent banquet of the celebration of ʿAnat. ʾEl will provide plenty of wine and victuals for the celebration and we will sacrifice to her an ox and a prime fatling. This interpretation fits into the pattern in some of the surrounding Egyptian inscriptions, according to the alphabet hypothesis, the shapes of the letters would have evolved from Proto-Sinaitic forms into Phoenician forms, but most of the names of the letters would have remained the same. Below is a table showing selected Proto-Sinaitic signs and the correspondences with Phoenician letters. Also shown are the values, names, and descendants of the Phoenician letters. The Other section shows the corresponding Archaic Greek, Modern Greek, Etruscan, abjad Byblos syllabary Ugaritic script Albright, Wm. F

5.
Paleo-Hebrew alphabet
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The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, also spelt Palaeo-Hebrew alphabet, is a variant of the Phoenician alphabet. Like the Phoenician alphabet, the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet contains 22 letters, all of which are consonants, the term was coined by Solomon Birnbaum in 1954, he wrote, To apply the term Phoenician to the script of the Hebrews is hardly suitable. Still, the script is nearly identical to the Phoenician script, archeological evidence of the use of the script by the Israelites for writing the Hebrew language dates to around the 10th century BCE. The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet began to fall out of use by the Jews in the 5th century BCE, the present Jewish square-script Hebrew alphabet evolved from the Aramaic alphabet. The Samaritans, now fewer than 1000 people, have continued to use a derivative of the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, the chart below compares the letters of the Phoenician script with those of the Paleo-Hebrew and the present Hebrew alphabet, with names traditionally used in English. According to contemporary scholars, the Paleo-Hebrew script developed alongside others in the region during the course of the late second and it is closely related to the Phoenician script. The earliest known inscription in the Paleo-Hebrew script was the Zayit Stone discovered on a wall at Tel Zayit, the 22 letters were carved on one side of the 38 lb stone - which resembles a bowl on the other. The find is attributed to the mid-10th century BCE, the script of the Gezer calendar, dated to the late 10th century BCE, bears strong resemblance to contemporaneous Phoenician script from inscriptions at Byblos. Clear Hebrew features are visible in the scripts of the Moabite inscriptions of the Mesha Stele, in 1855 a Phoenician inscription in 22 lines was found among the ruins of Sidon. Each line contained about 40 or 50 characters, a facsimile copy of the writing was published in United States Magazine in July 1855. The inscription was on the lid of a stone sarcophagus carved in fine Egyptian style. The writing was primarily a history of a king of Sidon buried in the sarcophagus. The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet was in use in the ancient Israelite kingdoms of Israel. Following the exile of the Kingdom of Judah in the 6th century BCE, in the Babylonian exile, Jews began using a form of the Assyrian script, the Samaritans, who remained in the Land of Israel, continued to use the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet. After the fall of the Persian Empire, Jews used both scripts before settling on the Assyrian form, for a limited time thereafter, the use of the Paleo-Hebrew script among Jews was retained only to write the Tetragrammaton. The independent Hebrew script evolved by developing numerous cursive features, the features of the Phoenician alphabet being ever less pronounced with the passage of time. The aversion of the script may indicate that the custom of erecting stelae by the kings. Even the engraved inscriptions from the 8th century exhibit elements of the style, such as the shading

6.
Aramaic alphabet
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The ancient Aramaic alphabet is adapted from the Phoenician alphabet and became distinctive from it by the 8th century BCE. It was used to write the Aramaic language and had displaced the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet for the writing of Hebrew, the letters all represent consonants, some of which are also used as matres lectionis to indicate long vowels. Rather, it is a different type, the earliest inscriptions in the Aramaic language use the Phoenician alphabet. Over time, the alphabet developed into the form shown below, Aramaic gradually became the lingua franca throughout the Middle East, with the script at first complementing and then displacing Assyrian cuneiform, as the predominant writing system. Imperial Aramaic was highly standardised, its orthography was based more on historical roots than any spoken dialect and was influenced by Old Persian. Both were in use through the Achaemenid Persian period, but the cursive form steadily gained ground over the lapidary, the Aramaic script would survive as the essential characteristics of the Iranian Pahlavi writing system. A group of 30 Aramaic documents from Bactria has been recently discovered, an analysis was published in November 2006. The texts, which were rendered on leather, reflect the use of Aramaic in the 4th century BC in the Persian Achaemenid administration of Bactria, the widespread usage of Achaemenid Aramaic in the Middle East led to the gradual adoption of the Aramaic alphabet for writing Hebrew. Formerly, Hebrew had been using an alphabet closer in form to that of Phoenician. After the fall of the Achaemenid Empire, the unity of the Imperial Aramaic script was lost, the Hebrew and Nabataean alphabets, as they stood by the Roman era, were little changed in style from the Imperial Aramaic alphabet. A cursive Hebrew variant developed from the early centuries AD, the Old Turkic script is generally considered to have its ultimate origins in Aramaic, in particular via the Pahlavi or Sogdian alphabets, as suggested by V. Thomsen, or possibly via Karosthi. Aramaic is also considered to be the most likely source of the Brahmi script, ancestor of the Brahmic family of scripts, today, Biblical Aramaic, Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialects and the Aramaic language of the Talmud are written in the Hebrew alphabet. Syriac and Christian Neo-Aramaic dialects are written in the Syriac alphabet, Mandaic is written in the Mandaic alphabet. The near-identity of the Aramaic and the classical Hebrew alphabets caused Aramaic text to be mostly in the standard Hebrew script in scholarly literature. In Maloula, one of few surviving communities in which a Western Aramaic dialect is still spoken and they started to use the Syriac alphabet instead. In Aramaic writing, Waw and Yodh serve a double function, originally, they represented only the consonants w and y, but they were later adopted to indicate the long vowels ū and ī respectively as well. In the latter role, they are known as matres lectionis or mothers of reading. Ālap, likewise, has some of the characteristics of a mater lectionis because in initial positions, it indicates a glottal stop, among Jews, the influence of Hebrew often led to the use of Hē instead, at the end of a word

7.
Greek alphabet
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It is the ancestor of the Latin and Cyrillic scripts. In its classical and modern forms, the alphabet has 24 letters, Modern and Ancient Greek use different diacritics. In standard Modern Greek spelling, orthography has been simplified to the monotonic system, examples In both Ancient and Modern Greek, the letters of the Greek alphabet have fairly stable and consistent symbol-to-sound mappings, making pronunciation of words largely predictable. Ancient Greek spelling was generally near-phonemic, among consonant letters, all letters that denoted voiced plosive consonants and aspirated plosives in Ancient Greek stand for corresponding fricative sounds in Modern Greek. This leads to groups of vowel letters denoting identical sounds today. Modern Greek orthography remains true to the spellings in most of these cases. The following vowel letters and digraphs are involved in the mergers, Modern Greek speakers typically use the same, modern, in other countries, students of Ancient Greek may use a variety of conventional approximations of the historical sound system in pronouncing Ancient Greek. Several letter combinations have special conventional sound values different from those of their single components, among them are several digraphs of vowel letters that formerly represented diphthongs but are now monophthongized. In addition to the three mentioned above, there is also ⟨ου⟩, pronounced /u/, the Ancient Greek diphthongs ⟨αυ⟩, ⟨ευ⟩ and ⟨ηυ⟩ are pronounced, and respectively in voicing environments in Modern Greek. The Modern Greek consonant combinations ⟨μπ⟩ and ⟨ντ⟩ stand for and respectively, ⟨τζ⟩ stands for, in addition, both in Ancient and Modern Greek, the letter ⟨γ⟩, before another velar consonant, stands for the velar nasal, thus ⟨γγ⟩ and ⟨γκ⟩ are pronounced like English ⟨ng⟩. There are also the combinations ⟨γχ⟩ and ⟨γξ⟩ and these signs were originally designed to mark different forms of the phonological pitch accent in Ancient Greek. The letter rho, although not a vowel, also carries a rough breathing in word-initial position, if a rho was geminated within a word, the first ρ always had the smooth breathing and the second the rough breathing leading to the transiliteration rrh. The vowel letters ⟨α, η, ω⟩ carry an additional diacritic in certain words, the iota subscript. This iota represents the former offglide of what were originally long diphthongs, ⟨ᾱι, ηι, ωι⟩, another diacritic used in Greek is the diaeresis, indicating a hiatus. In 1982, a new, simplified orthography, known as monotonic, was adopted for use in Modern Greek by the Greek state. Although it is not a diacritic, the comma has a function as a silent letter in a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishing ό. There are many different methods of rendering Greek text or Greek names in the Latin script, the form in which classical Greek names are conventionally rendered in English goes back to the way Greek loanwords were incorporated into Latin in antiquity. In this system, ⟨κ⟩ is replaced with ⟨c⟩, the diphthongs ⟨αι⟩ and ⟨οι⟩ are rendered as ⟨ae⟩ and ⟨oe⟩ respectively, and ⟨ει⟩ and ⟨ου⟩ are simplified to ⟨i⟩ and ⟨u⟩ respectively

8.
Tifinagh
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Tifinagh is an abjad used to write the Berber languages. A modern alphabetical derivate of the script, known as Neo-Tifinagh, was introduced in the 20th century. Tifinagh is believed to have descended from the ancient Libyan or Libyco-Berber script, the latter writing system was widely used in antiquity by speakers of Berber languages throughout Africa and on the Canary Islands. It is attested from the 3rd century BC to the 3rd century AD, the scripts origin is uncertain, with some scholars suggesting it is related to the Punic alphabet or the Phoenician alphabet. There are two variants, eastern and western. The eastern variant was used in what is now Constantine, the Aures region and it is the best-deciphered variant, due to the discovery of several Numidian bilingual inscriptions in Libyan and Punic. 22 letters out of the 24 were deciphered, the western variant was more primitive. It was used along the Mediterranean coast from Kabylie to the Canary Islands, the Libyco-Berber script was a pure abjad, it had no vowels. The writing was usually from the bottom to the top, although right-to-left, the letters would take different forms when written vertically than when they were written horizontally. The Libyco-Berber script is used in the form of Tifinagh to write the Tuareg languages. Early uses of the script have been found on rock art, among these are the 1,500 year old tomb of the Tuareg matriarch Tin hinan, where vestiges of a Tifinagh inscription have been found on one of its walls. Occasionally, the script has been used to other neighboring languages such as Tagdal Songhay. Common forms of the letters are illustrated at left, including various ligatures of t and n, gemination, though phonemic, is not indicated in Tifinagh. The letter t, +, is combined with a preceding letter to form a ligature. Most of the letters have more than one form, including mirror-images of the forms shown here. When the letters l and n are adjacent to themselves or to each other, for example, since the letter l is a double line, ||, and n a single line, |, the sequence nn may be written |/ to differentiate it from l. Similarly, ln is ||/, nl |//, ll ||//, nnn |/|, traditionally, the Tifinagh script does not indicate vowels except word-finally, where a single dot stands for any vowel. In some areas, Arabic vowel diacritics are combined with Tifinagh letters to transcribe vowels, Neo-Tifinagh is the modern fully alphabetic script developed from earlier forms of Tifinagh

9.
Paleohispanic scripts
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The Paleohispanic scripts are the writing systems created in the Iberian peninsula before the Latin alphabet became the dominant script. Most of them are unusual in that they are rather than purely alphabetic, despite having supposedly developed, in part. Some researchers conclude that their origin may lie solely with the Phoenician alphabet, the Paleoiberian scripts are classified into three major groups, southern, northern, and Greco-Iberian, with differences both in the shapes of the glyphs and in their values. Inscriptions in the scripts have been found mainly in the southern half of the Iberian Peninsula. They represent only 5% of the inscriptions found, and mostly read from right to left and they are, the Espanca script, the Tartessian or Southwestern script, also known as South Lusitanian, the Southeastern Iberian script, also known as Meridional. Inscriptions in the scripts have been found mainly in the NE of the Iberian Peninsula. They represent 95% of the inscriptions found, and mostly read from left to right and they are, the Northeastern Iberian script, also known as Levantine, Dual variant Non-dual variant the Celtiberian script Western variant Eastern variant. This unique writing system has been called a semi-syllabary, in addition, the original format did not distinguish voiced from unvoiced plosives, so that ga stood for both /ga/ and /ka/, and da stood for both /da/ and /ta/. On the other hand, the continuants were written with simple alphabetic letters, as in Phoenician, if correct, this innovation would parallel the creation of the Latin letter G by the addition of a stroke to C, which had previously stood for both /k/ and /g/. The Tartessian script is typologically intermediate between a pure alphabet and the Paleohispanic semi-syllabaries, although the letter used to write a plosive was determined by the following vowel, as in a semi-syllabary, the following vowel was also written, as in an alphabet. This redundant typology re-emerged in a few texts of northeastern Iberian and Celtiberian scripts. The only known full Paleoiberian signary, on the undated Espanca tablet, follows the Phoenician/Greek order for the first 13 of its 27 letters, Α Β Γ Δ Ι Κ Λ Μ Ν Ξ Π. However, the order of what appears to be /u/ directly after Τ, the obvious question about the origin and evolution of these scripts is how a purely alphabetic script was changed into, or perhaps unconsciously reinterpreted as, a partial syllabary. It may be instructive to consider an unrelated development in the evolution of the Etruscan alphabet from Greek, Greek had three letters, Γ, Κ, and Ϙ, whose sounds were not distinguished in Etruscan. Nonetheless, all three were borrowed, becoming the letters C, K, and Q. When the Etruscan alphabet was adapted to Latin, the letter C stood for both /k/ and /g/, as Etruscan had had no /g/ sound to maintain the original sound value of Greek Г. Something similar may have happened during the evolution of the Paleoiberian scripts, in Tartessian script, vowels were always written after the plosives, but they were redundant — or at nearly so — and thus it seems they were dropped when the script passed to the Iberians. Among the velar consonants, ka/ga of southeastern Iberian and the southwestern script derives from Phoenician/Greek Γ, ke/ge from Κ, Phoenician/Greek labial letter Β was the source of southwestern be, southeastern ba, the use of Π is uncertain but may have been the source of bi

10.
Ancient South Arabian script
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The ancient Yemeni alphabet branched from the Proto-Sinaitic script in about the 9th century BC. It was used for writing the Old South Arabian languages of the Sabaic, Qatabanic, Hadramautic, Minaean, Himyaritic, the earliest inscriptions in the alphabet date to the 9th century BC in the Akele Guzai region, Eritrea. There are no vowels, instead using the mater lectionis to mark them, in Ethiopia and Eritrea it evolved later into the Geez script, which, with added symbols throughout the centuries, has been used to write Amharic, Tigrinya and Tigre, as well as other languages. Zabūr is the name of the form of the South Arabian script that was used by the ancient Yemenis in addition to their monumental script. As yet only one thousand such texts have been discovered, of which perhaps some 26 have been published. It is usually written from right to left but can also be written left to right. When written from left to right the characters are flipped horizontally, the spacing or separation between words is done with a vertical bar mark. Letters in words are not connected together and it does not implement any diacritical marks, differing in this respect from the modern Arabic alphabet. The South Arabian alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard in October,2009 with the release of version 5.2, the Unicode block, called Old South Arabian, is U+10A60–U+10A7F. Note that U+10A7D OLD SOUTH ARABIAN NUMBER ONE represents both the one and a word divider. Photos from National Museum of Yemen, Photos from Yemen Military Museum, Eduard Glaser Carl Rathjens Stein, the Ancient South Arabian Minuscule Inscriptions on Wood, A New Genre of Pre-Islamic Epigraphy. Jaarbericht van het Vooraziatisch-Egyptisch Genootschap Ex Oriente Lux, die altsüdarabischen Minuskelinschriften auf Holzstäbchen aus der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek in München. Il trono della regina di Saba, Artemide, Roma. pp. 149–155, Ancient scripts on South Arabian SI Omniglots entry on South Arabian

11.
Universal Character Set characters
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The Unicode Consortium and the International Organisation for Standardisation collaborate on the Universal Character Set. The UCS is a standard to map characters used in natural language, mathematics, music. By creating this mapping, the UCS enables computer software vendors to interoperate, because it is a universal map, it can be used to represent multiple languages at the same time. UCS has a capacity to encode over 1 million characters. Each UCS character is represented by a code point, which is an integer between 0 and 1,114,111, used to represent each character within the internal logic of text processing software. The number of encoded characters is made up as follows,128,019 graphical characters 218 special purpose characters for control, ISO maintains the basic mapping of characters from character name to code point. Often the terms character and code point will get used interchangeably, however, when a distinction is made, a code point refers to the integer of the character, what one might think of as its address. Input methods can be through keyboard or a character palette. The UCS can be divided in various ways, such as by plane, block, character category, the x must be lowercase in XML documents. The nnnn or hhhh may be any number of digits and may include leading zeros, the hhhh may mix uppercase and lowercase, though uppercase is the usual style. In contrast, an entity reference refers to a character by the name of an entity which has the desired character as its replacement text. The entity must either be predefined or explicitly declared in a Document Type Definition, the format is the same as for any entity reference, &name, where name is the case-sensitive name of the entity. Unicode and ISO divide the set of points into 17 planes. As of 2016 ISO and the Unicode Consortium has only allocated characters, the others remain empty and reserved for future use. Most characters are assigned to the first plane, the Basic Multilingual Plane. This is to ease the transition for legacy software since the Basic Multilingual Plane is addressable with just two octets. The characters outside the first plane usually have very specialized or rare use. Each plane corresponds with the value of the one or two hexadecimal digits preceding the four ones, hence U+24321 is in Plane 2, U+4321 is in Plane 0

12.
International Phonetic Alphabet
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The International Phonetic Alphabet is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association as a representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign students and teachers, linguists, speech-language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators. The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are part of language, phones, phonemes, intonation. IPA symbols are composed of one or more elements of two types, letters and diacritics. For example, the sound of the English letter ⟨t⟩ may be transcribed in IPA with a letter, or with a letter plus diacritics. Often, slashes are used to signal broad or phonemic transcription, thus, /t/ is less specific than, occasionally letters or diacritics are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of the most recent change in 2005, there are 107 letters,52 diacritics and these are shown in the current IPA chart, posted below in this article and at the website of the IPA. In 1886, a group of French and British language teachers, led by the French linguist Paul Passy, for example, the sound was originally represented with the letter ⟨c⟩ in English, but with the digraph ⟨ch⟩ in French. However, in 1888, the alphabet was revised so as to be uniform across languages, the idea of making the IPA was first suggested by Otto Jespersen in a letter to Paul Passy. It was developed by Alexander John Ellis, Henry Sweet, Daniel Jones, since its creation, the IPA has undergone a number of revisions. After major revisions and expansions in 1900 and 1932, the IPA remained unchanged until the International Phonetic Association Kiel Convention in 1989, a minor revision took place in 1993 with the addition of four letters for mid central vowels and the removal of letters for voiceless implosives. The alphabet was last revised in May 2005 with the addition of a letter for a labiodental flap, apart from the addition and removal of symbols, changes to the IPA have consisted largely in renaming symbols and categories and in modifying typefaces. Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for speech pathology were created in 1990, the general principle of the IPA is to provide one letter for each distinctive sound, although this practice is not followed if the sound itself is complex. There are no letters that have context-dependent sound values, as do hard, finally, the IPA does not usually have separate letters for two sounds if no known language makes a distinction between them, a property known as selectiveness. These are organized into a chart, the chart displayed here is the chart as posted at the website of the IPA. The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet, for this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither, for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ⟨ʔ⟩, has the form of a question mark

13.
Specials (Unicode block)
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Specials is a short Unicode block allocated at the very end of the Basic Multilingual Plane, at U+FFF0–FFFF. Of these 16 codepoints, five are assigned as of Unicode 9, U+FFFD � REPLACEMENT CHARACTER used to replace an unknown, unrecognized or unrepresentable character U+FFFE <noncharacter-FFFE> not a character. FFFE and FFFF are not unassigned in the sense. They can be used to guess a texts encoding scheme, since any text containing these is by not a correctly encoded Unicode text. The replacement character � is a found in the Unicode standard at codepoint U+FFFD in the Specials table. It is used to indicate problems when a system is unable to render a stream of data to a correct symbol and it is usually seen when the data is invalid and does not match any character, Consider a text file containing the German word für in the ISO-8859-1 encoding. This file is now opened with an editor that assumes the input is UTF-8. The first and last byte are valid UTF-8 encodings of ASCII, therefore, a text editor could replace this byte with the replacement character symbol to produce a valid string of Unicode code points. The whole string now displays like this, f�r, a poorly implemented text editor might save the replacement in UTF-8 form, the text file data will then look like this, 0x66 0xEF 0xBF 0xBD 0x72, which will be displayed in ISO-8859-1 as fï¿½r. Since the replacement is the same for all errors this makes it impossible to recover the original character, a better design is to preserve the original bytes, including the error, and only convert to the replacement when displaying the text. This will allow the text editor to save the original byte sequence and it has become increasingly common for software to interpret invalid UTF-8 by guessing the bytes are in another byte-based encoding such as ISO-8859-1. This allows correct display of both valid and invalid UTF-8 pasted together, Unicode control characters UTF-8 Mojibake Unicodes Specials table Decodeunicodes entry for the replacement character

14.
Unicode
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Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the worlds writing systems. As of June 2016, the most recent version is Unicode 9.0, the standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium. Unicodes success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread, the standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including modern operating systems, XML, Java, and the. NET Framework. Unicode can be implemented by different character encodings, the most commonly used encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16 and the now-obsolete UCS-2. UTF-8 uses one byte for any ASCII character, all of which have the same values in both UTF-8 and ASCII encoding, and up to four bytes for other characters. UCS-2 uses a 16-bit code unit for each character but cannot encode every character in the current Unicode standard, UTF-16 extends UCS-2, using one 16-bit unit for the characters that were representable in UCS-2 and two 16-bit units to handle each of the additional characters. Many traditional character encodings share a common problem in that they allow bilingual computer processing, Unicode, in intent, encodes the underlying characters—graphemes and grapheme-like units—rather than the variant glyphs for such characters. In the case of Chinese characters, this leads to controversies over distinguishing the underlying character from its variant glyphs. In text processing, Unicode takes the role of providing a unique code point—a number, in other words, Unicode represents a character in an abstract way and leaves the visual rendering to other software, such as a web browser or word processor. This simple aim becomes complicated, however, because of concessions made by Unicodes designers in the hope of encouraging a more rapid adoption of Unicode, the first 256 code points were made identical to the content of ISO-8859-1 so as to make it trivial to convert existing western text. For other examples, see duplicate characters in Unicode and he explained that he name Unicode is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding. In this document, entitled Unicode 88, Becker outlined a 16-bit character model, Unicode could be roughly described as wide-body ASCII that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the worlds living languages. In a properly engineered design,16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose, Unicode aims in the first instance at the characters published in modern text, whose number is undoubtedly far below 214 =16,384. By the end of 1990, most of the work on mapping existing character encoding standards had been completed, the Unicode Consortium was incorporated in California on January 3,1991, and in October 1991, the first volume of the Unicode standard was published. The second volume, covering Han ideographs, was published in June 1992, in 1996, a surrogate character mechanism was implemented in Unicode 2.0, so that Unicode was no longer restricted to 16 bits. The Microsoft TrueType specification version 1.0 from 1992 used the name Apple Unicode instead of Unicode for the Platform ID in the naming table, Unicode defines a codespace of 1,114,112 code points in the range 0hex to 10FFFFhex. Normally a Unicode code point is referred to by writing U+ followed by its hexadecimal number, for code points in the Basic Multilingual Plane, four digits are used, for code points outside the BMP, five or six digits are used, as required. Code points in Planes 1 through 16 are accessed as surrogate pairs in UTF-16, within each plane, characters are allocated within named blocks of related characters

15.
History of the alphabet
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The history of alphabetic writing goes back to the consonantal writing system used for Semitic languages in the Levant in the 2nd millennium BCE. Most or nearly all alphabetic scripts used throughout the world today ultimately go back to this Semitic proto-alphabet and its first origins can be traced back to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers in Egypt. This script was partly influenced by the older Egyptian hieratic, a script related to Egyptian hieroglyphs. In this sense, the first true alphabet was the Greek alphabet, Latin, the most widely used alphabet today, in turn derives from Greek. Two scripts are well attested from before the end of the fourth millennium BCE, Mesopotamian cuneiform, since vowels were mostly unwritten, the hieroglyphs which indicated a single consonant could have been used as a consonantal alphabet. This was not done writing the Egyptian language, but seems to have been significant influence on the creation of the first alphabet. The Rongorongo script of Easter Island may also be an invented alphabet. The Proto-Sinaitic script of Egypt has yet to be fully deciphered, however, it may be alphabetic and probably records the Canaanite language. The oldest examples are found as graffiti in the Wadi el Hol, the table below shows hypothetical prototypes of the Phoenician alphabet in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Several correspondences have been proposed with Proto-Sinaitic letters and this Semitic script adapted Egyptian hieroglyphs to write consonantal values based on the first sound of the Semitic name for the object depicted by the hieroglyph. So, for example, the hieroglyph per was used to write the sound in Semitic, because was the first sound in the Semitic word for house, bayt. The script was used sporadically, and retained its pictographic nature, for half a millennium. The first Canaanite states to make use of the alphabet were the Phoenician city-states. The Phoenician cities were maritime states at the center of a vast trade network, two variants of the Phoenician alphabet had major impacts on the history of writing, the Aramaic alphabet and the Greek alphabet. The Phoenician and Aramaic alphabets, like their Egyptian prototype, represented only consonants, the Arabic alphabet descended from Aramaic via the Nabataean alphabet of what is now southern Jordan. The Syriac alphabet used after the 3rd century CE evolved, through Pahlavi and Sogdian, into the alphabets of northern Asia, such as Orkhon, Uyghur, Mongolian, the Georgian alphabet is of uncertain provenance, but appears to be part of the Persian-Aramaic family. According to Greek legends transmitted by Herodotus, the alphabet was brought from Phoenicia to Greece by Cadmos, the letters of the Greek alphabet are the same as those of the Phoenician alphabet, and both alphabets are arranged in the same order. The Greeks used for some of the Phoenician letters representing consonants which werent used in Greek speech

16.
Hieratic
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Hieratic is a cursive writing system used in the provenance of the pharaohs in Egypt and Nubia. It developed alongside cursive hieroglyphs, from which it is separate yet intimately related and it was primarily written in ink with a reed brush on papyrus, allowing scribes to write quickly without resorting to the time-consuming hieroglyphs. In the 2nd century AD, the term hieratic was first used by Saint Clement of Alexandria. It derives from the Greek phrase γράμματα ἱερατικά, as at time, hieratic was used only for religious texts, as had been the case for the previous eight. Hieratic can also be an adjective meaning f or associated with sacred persons or offices, in the Proto-Dynastic Period of Egypt, hieratic first appeared and developed alongside the more formal hieroglyphic script. It is an error to view hieratic as a derivative of hieroglyphic writing, indeed, the earliest texts from Egypt are produced with ink and brush, with no indication their signs are descendants of hieroglyphs. True monumental hieroglyphs carved in stone did not appear until the 1st Dynasty, the two writing systems, therefore, are related, parallel developments, rather than a single linear one. Hieratic was used throughout the period and into the Graeco-Roman Period. Around 660 BC, the Demotic script replaced hieratic in most secular writing, through most of its long history, hieratic was used for writing administrative documents, accounts, legal texts, and letters, as well as mathematical, medical, literary, and religious texts. During the Græco-Roman period, when Demotic had become the chief administrative script, in general, hieratic was much more important than hieroglyphs throughout Egypts history, being the script used in daily life. It was also the system first taught to students, knowledge of hieroglyphs being limited to a small minority who were given additional training. In fact, it is possible to detect errors in hieroglyphic texts that came about due to a misunderstanding of an original hieratic text. Most often, hieratic script was written in ink with a brush on papyrus, wood. Thousands of limestone ostraca have been found at the site of Deir al-Madinah, besides papyrus, stone, ceramic shards, and wood, there are hieratic texts on leather rolls, though few have survived. There are also hieratic texts written on cloth, especially on linen used in mummification, there are some hieratic texts inscribed on stone, a variety known as lapidary hieratic, these are particularly common on stelae from the 22nd Dynasty. During the late 6th Dynasty, hieratic was sometimes incised into mud tablets with a stylus, similar to cuneiform. About five hundred of these tablets have been discovered in the palace at Ayn Asil. At the time the tablets were made, Dakhla was located far from centers of papyrus production and these tablets record inventories, name lists, accounts, and approximately fifty letters

17.
Demotic (Egyptian)
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The term was first used by the Greek historian Herodotus to distinguish it from hieratic and hieroglyphic scripts. By convention, the word Demotic is capitalized in order to distinguish it from demotic Greek, the Demotic script was referred to by the Egyptians as sš n šˤ. The script was used for more than a thousand years, and it is written and read from right to left, while earlier hieroglyphics could be written from top to bottom, left to right, or right to left. Early Demotic developed in Lower Egypt during the part of the 25th dynasty. It is generally dated between 650 and 400 BCE, as most texts written in Early Demotic are dated to the 26th dynasty, during this period, Demotic was used only for administrative, legal, and commercial texts, while hieroglyphs and hieratic were reserved for other texts. Middle Demotic is the stage of writing used during the Ptolemaic Period, from the 4th century BCE onward, Demotic held a higher status, as may be seen from its increasing use for literary and religious texts. From the beginning of Roman rule of Egypt, Demotic was progressively less used in public life. In contrast to the way Latin eliminated minority languages in the part of the Empire. After that, Demotic was only used for a few ostraca, subscriptions to Greek texts, mummy labels, and graffiti. The last dated example of the Demotic script is dated to December 11,452 CE, Demotic is a development of Late Egyptian and shares much with the later Coptic phase of the Egyptian language. In the earlier stages of Demotic, such as those written in the Early Demotic script. The Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799 and it is inscribed with three scripts, classical Greek and both Demotic and hieroglyphic Egyptian. There are 32 lines of Demotic, which is the middle of the three scripts on the stone, the Demotic was deciphered before the hieroglyphs, starting with the efforts of Silvestre de Sacy. Egyptologists, linguists and papyrologists who specialize in the study of the Demotic stage of Egyptian script are known as Demotists, the table below shows some derivative similarities from Hieroglyphic to Demotic to the currently surviving Coptic Egyptian script. Transliteration of Ancient Egyptian Betrò, Maria Carmela, hieroglyphics, The Writings of Ancient Egypt. New York, Milan, Abbeville Press, Arnoldo Mondadori, thus Wrote Onchsheshonqy, An Introductory Grammar of Demotic. Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization, No.45

18.
Meroitic alphabet
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The Meroitic script is an alphabetic script, used to write the Meroitic language of the Kingdom of Meroë in Sudan. It was developed in the Napatan Period, and first appears in the 2nd century BCE, for a time, it was also possibly used to write the Nubian language of the successor Nubian kingdoms. Its use was described by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, the Nubian form of the Greek alphabet retained three Meroitic letters. The script was deciphered in 1909 by Francis Llewellyn Griffith, a British Egyptologist, however, the Meroitic language itself has yet to be translated. In late 2008, the first complete royal dedication was found, the longest inscription found is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. There were two forms of the Meroitic alphabet, monumental hieroglyphs, and a cursive. The majority of texts are cursive, unlike Egyptian writing, there was a simple one-to-one correspondence between the two forms of Meroitic, except that in the cursive form, consonants are joined in ligatures to a following vowel i. The direction of writing was from right to left, top to bottom. Monumental letters were oriented to face the beginning of the text, being primarily alphabetic, the Meroitic script worked differently than Egyptian hieroglyphs. Some scholars, such as Harald Haarmann, believe that the letters of Meroitic are evidence for an influence of the Greek alphabet in its development. There were 23 letters in the Meroitic alphabet, including four vowels, the fourteen or so consonants are conventionally transcribed, ya, wa, ba, pa, ma, na, ra, la, cha, kha, ka, qa, sa, da. These values were established from evidence such as Egyptian names borrowed into Meroitic. That is, the Meroitic letter which looks like an owl in monumental inscriptions, however, this is a historical reconstruction, and while m is not in much doubt, the pronunciations of some of the other letters are much less certain. The three vowels i a o were presumably pronounced /i a u/, kh is thought to have been a velar fricative, as the ch in Scottish loch or German Bach. Ch was a sound, perhaps uvular as g in Dutch dag or palatal as in German ich. Q was perhaps a uvular stop, as in Arabic Qatar, S may have been like s in sun. An /n/ was omitted in writing when it occurred before any of other consonants within a word. Griffith first transcribed it as r, and Rowan believes that was closer to its actual value

19.
Ugaritic alphabet
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The Ugaritic script is a cuneiform abjad used from around either the fifteenth century BCE or 1300 BCE for Ugaritic, an extinct Northwest Semitic language, and discovered in Ugarit, Syria, in 1928. Other languages were written in the Ugaritic script in the area around Ugarit. Arabic and Old South Arabian are the only other Semitic alphabets which have letters for all or almost all of the 29 commonly reconstructed proto-Semitic consonant phonemes, the script was written from left to right. Although cuneiform and pressed into clay, its symbols were unrelated to those of the Akkadian cuneiform, in most syllables only consonants were written, including the /w/ and /j/ of diphthongs. However, Ugaritic was unusual among early abjads in also writing vowels after the glottal stop, in function, is like Ugaritic s, but only in certain words – other s-words are never written with. Segert instead theorizes that it may have been syllabic /su/, and for this reason grouped with the syllabic signs /ʔi/. Probably the last three letters of the alphabet were originally developed for transcribing non-Ugaritic languages, and were applied to write the Ugaritic language. The three letters denoting glottal stop plus vowel combinations were used as simple vowel letters when writing other languages, the only punctuation is a word divider. At the time the Ugaritic script was in use, Ugarit was at the centre of the world, among Egypt, Anatolia, Cyprus, Crete. Ugaritic combined the system of the Semitic abjad with cuneiform writing methods, however, scholars have searched in vain for graphic prototypes of the Ugaritic letters in Mesopotamian cuneiform. Recently, some have suggested that Ugaritic represents some form of the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet, the letter forms distorted as an adaptation to writing on clay with a stylus. Other letters look similar as well,

20.
Ge'ez alphabet
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Geez is a script used as an abugida for several languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea. It originated as an abjad and was first used to write Geez, now the language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. In Amharic and Tigrinya, the script is often called fidäl, the Geez script has been adapted to write other, mostly Semitic, languages, particularly Amharic in Ethiopia, and Tigrinya in both Eritrea and Ethiopia. It is also used for Sebatbeit, Meen, and most other languages of Ethiopia, in Eritrea it is used for Tigre, and it has traditionally been used for Blin, a Cushitic language. Tigre, spoken in western and northern Eritrea, is considered to resemble Geez more than do the other derivative languages, some other languages in the Horn of Africa, such as Oromo, used to be written using Geez, but have migrated to Latin-based orthographies. For the representation of sounds, this uses a system that is common among linguists who work on Ethiopian Semitic languages. This differs somewhat from the conventions of the International Phonetic Alphabet, see the articles on the individual languages for information on the pronunciation. The earliest inscriptions of Semitic languages in Eritrea and Ethiopia date to the 9th century BC in Epigraphic South Arabian, after the 7th and 6th centuries BC, however, variants of the script arose, evolving in the direction of the Geez abugida. This evolution can be seen most clearly in evidence from inscriptions in Tigray region in northern Ethiopia, at least one of Wazebas coins from the late 3rd or early 4th century contains a vocalized letter, some 30 or so years before Ezana. It has been argued that the marking pattern of the script reflects a South Asian system. On the other hand, emphatic P̣ait ጰ, a Geez innovation, is a modification of Ṣädai ጸ, while Pesa ፐ is based on Tawe ተ. Thus, there are 24 correspondences of Geez and the South Arabian alphabet, Many of the names are cognate with those of Phoenician. Two alphabets were used to write the Geez language, an abjad and later an abugida. The abjad, used until c.330 AD, had 26 consonantal letters, h, l, ḥ, m, ś, r, s, ḳ, b, t, ḫ, n, ʾ, k, w, ʿ, z, y, d, g, ṭ, p̣, ṣ, ṣ́, f, p Vowels were not indicated. Modern Geez is written left to right. The Geez abugida developed under the influence of Christian scripture by adding obligatory vocalic diacritics to the consonantal letters. The diacritics for the vowels, u, i, a, e, ə, o, were fused with the consonants in a recognizable but slightly irregular way, the original form of the consonant was used when the vowel was ä, the so-called inherent vowel. The resulting forms are shown below in their traditional order, for some consonants, there is an eighth form for the diphthong -wa or -oa, and a ninth for -yä

21.
Samaritan alphabet
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Samaritan is a direct descendant of the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, which was a variety of the Phoenician alphabet in which large parts of the Hebrew Bible were originally penned. All these scripts are believed to be descendants of the Proto-Sinaitic script and that script was used by the ancient Israelites, both Jews and Samaritans. The better-known square script Hebrew alphabet traditionally used by Jews is a version of the Aramaic alphabet which they adopted from the Persian Empire. After the fall of the Persian Empire, Judaism used both scripts before settling on the Aramaic form, for a limited time thereafter, the use of paleo-Hebrew among Jews was retained only to write the Tetragrammaton, but soon that custom was also abandoned. The Samaritan alphabet first became known to the Western world with the publication of a manuscript of the Samaritan Pentateuch in 1631 by Jean Morin. In 1616 the traveler Pietro della Valle had purchased a copy of the text in Damascus, the table below shows the development of the Samaritan script. On the left are the corresponding Hebrew letters for comparison, column I is the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet. Column X shows the form of the letters. Samaritan script was added to the Unicode Standard in October 2009 with the release of version 5.2, the Unicode block for Samaritan is U+0800–U+083F, Flôrenṭîn, Moše. Late Samaritan Hebrew, A Linguistic Analysis Of Its Different Types, a Samaritan Bible, at the British library Omniglot. com - Samaritan alphabet Link to free Samaritan font

22.
Kharosthi
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The Kharosthi script, also spelled Kharoshthi or Kharoṣṭhī, is an ancient script used in ancient Gandhara to write the Gandhari Prakrit and Sanskrit. It was popular in Central Asia as well, an abugida, it was in use from the middle of the 3rd century BCE until it died out in its homeland around the 3rd century CE. Kharosthi is encoded in the Unicode range U+10A00–U+10A5F, from version 4.1.0, Kharosthi is mostly written right to left, but some inscriptions already show the left to right direction that was to become universal for the later South Asian scripts. Each syllable includes the short /a/ sound by default, with other vowels being indicated by diacritic marks, Kharosthi includes only one standalone vowel sign which is used for initial vowels in words. Other initial vowels use the a character modified by diacritics, using epigraphic evidence, Salomon has established that the vowel order is /a e i o u/, rather than the usual vowel order for Indic scripts /a i u e o/. That is the same as the Semitic vowel order, also, there is no differentiation between long and short vowels in Kharosthi. Both are marked using the same vowel markers, the alphabet was used in Gandharan Buddhism as a mnemonic for remembering a series of verses on the nature of phenomena. In Tantric Buddhism, the list was incorporated into ritual practices, Kharosthi included a set of numerals that are reminiscent of Roman numerals. The symbols were I for the unit, X for four, ੭ for ten, the system is based on an additive and a multiplicative principle, but does not have the subtractive feature used in the Roman number system. Note that the table beside reads right-to-left, just like the Kharosthi abugida itself, the Kharosthi script was deciphered by James Prinsep using the bilingual coins of the Indo-Greek Kingdom. This in turn led to the reading of the Edicts of Ashoka, some of which, scholars are not in agreement as to whether the Kharosthi script evolved gradually, or was the deliberate work of a single inventor. An analysis of the script forms shows a clear dependency on the Aramaic alphabet, however, no intermediate forms have yet been found to confirm this evolutionary model, and rock and coin inscriptions from the 3rd century BCE onward show a unified and standard form. An inscription in Aramaic dating back to the 4th century BC was found in Sirkap, according to Sir John Marshall, this seems to confirm that Kharoshthi was later developed from Aramaic. The manuscripts were donated to the British Library in 1994, the entire set of manuscripts are dated to the 1st century CE, making them the oldest Buddhist manuscripts yet discovered. Kharosthi was added to the Unicode Standard in March,2005 with the release of version 4.1, the Unicode block for Kharosthi is U+10A00–U+10A5F, Brahmi History of Afghanistan History of Pakistan Pre-Islamic scripts in Afghanistan Kaschgar und die Kharoṣṭhī Dani, Ahmad Hassan. Kharoshthi Primer, Lahore Museum Publication Series -16, Lahore,1979 Falk, Schrift im alten Indien, Ein Forschungsbericht mit Anmerkungen, Gunter Narr Verlag,1993 Fussmans, Gérard. Les premiers systèmes décriture en Inde, in Annuaire du Collège de France 1988-1989 Hinüber, der Beginn der Schrift und frühe Schriftlichkeit in Indien, Franz Steiner Verlag,1990 Nasim Khan, M. Ashokan Inscriptions, A Palaeographical Study. Two Dated Kharoshthi Inscriptions from Gandhara, Journal of Asian Civilizations, Vol. XXII, No.1, July 1999, 99-103

23.
Brahmi script
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Brahmi is the modern name given to one of the oldest writing systems used in South and Central Asia from the 1st millennium BCE. Brahmi is an abugida that thrived in the Indian subcontinent and uses a system of marks to associate vowels with consonant symbols. It evolved into a host of other scripts that continue in use, Brahmi is related to the ancient Kharosthi script, which was used in what is now eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan. Kharosthi died out in ancient times, the best-known Brahmi inscriptions are the rock-cut edicts of Ashoka in north-central India, dating to 250–232 BCE. The script was deciphered in 1837 by James Prinsep, an archaeologist, philologist, Brahmi was at one time referred to in English as the pin-man script, that is stick figure script. Thence the name was adopted in the work of Georg Bühler. The Gupta script of the 5th century is sometimes called Late Brahmi, the Brahmi script diversified into numerous local variants, classified together as the Brahmic scripts. Dozens of modern scripts used across South Asia have descended from Brahmi, one survey found 198 scripts that ultimately derive from it. The script was associated with its own Brahmi numerals, which provided the graphic forms for the Hindu–Arabic numeral system now used through most of the world. The Brahmi script is mentioned in the ancient Indian texts of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism, for example, the Lipisala samdarshana parivarta lists 64 lipi, with the Brahmi script starting the list. The Lalitavistara Sūtra states that young Siddhartha, the future Buddha, mastered philology, Brahmi and other scripts from Brahmin Lipikara, a shorter list of eighteen ancient scripts is found in the texts of Jainism, such as the Pannavana Sutra and the Samavayanga Sutra. These Jaina script lists include Brahmi at number 1 and Kharoshthi at number 4 but also Javanaliya, while the contemporary Kharosthi script is widely accepted to be a derivation of the Aramaic alphabet, the genesis of the Brahmi script is less straightforward. Salomon reviewed existing theories in 1998, while Falk provided an overview in 1993, an origin in Semitic scripts has been proposed by some scholars since the publications by Albrecht Weber and Georg Bühlers On the origin of the Indian Brahma alphabet. The most disputed point about the origin of the Brahmi script has long been whether it was an indigenous development or was borrowed or derived from scripts that originated outside India. Most scholars believe that Brahmi was likely derived from or influenced by a Semitic script model, however, the issue is not settled due to the lack of direct evidence and unexplained differences between Aramaic, Kharosthi and Brahmi. Virtually all authors accept that regardless of the origins, the degree of Indian development of the Brahmi script in both the form and the structure has been extensive. It is also accepted that theories of Vedic grammar probably had a strong influence on this development. In contrast, some reject the idea of foreign influence

24.
Brahmic scripts
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The Brahmic scripts are a family of abugida or alphabet writing systems. They are used throughout the Indian Subcontinent, Southeast Asia and parts of East Asia, and were used in Japan. They are used by languages of several families, Indo-European, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, Mongolic, Austroasiatic, Austronesian. They were also the source of the order of Japanese kana. Brahmic scripts descended from the Brahmi script, the most reliable of these were short Brahmi inscriptions dated to the 4th century BC and published by Coningham et al. Northern Brahmi gave rise to the Gupta script during the Gupta period, the Siddhaṃ script was especially important in Buddhism, as many sutras were written in it. The art of Siddham calligraphy survives today in Japan, the syllabic nature and dictionary order of the modern kana system of Japanese writing is believed to be descended from the Indic scripts, most likely through the spread of Buddhism. Southern Brahmi evolved into Old-Kannada, Pallava and Vatteluttu scripts, which in turn diversified into other scripts of South India, Bhattiprolu was a great centre of Buddhism during 3rd century BCE and from where Buddhism spread to east Asia. The present Telugu script is derived from Bhattiprolu Script or Kannada-Telugu script or Kadamba script, also known as old Telugu script, owing to its similarity to the same. Initially, minor changes were made which is now called Tamil Brahmi which has far fewer letters than some of the other Indic scripts as it has no separate aspirated or voiced consonants. Some characteristics, which are present in most but not all the scripts, are, other vowels are written by adding to the character. A mark, known in Sanskrit as a virama/halant can be used to indicate the absence of an inherent vowel, Each vowel has two forms, an independent form when not part of a consonant, and a dependent form, when attached to a consonant. Depending on the script, the dependent forms can be placed to the left of, to the right of, above, below. Consonants can be combined in ligatures, special marks are added to denote the combination of r with another consonant. Nasalization and aspiration of a dependent vowel is also noted by separate signs. The alphabetical order is, vowels, velar consonants, palatal consonants, retroflex consonants, dental consonants, bilabial consonants, approximants, sibilants, Each consonant grouping had four stops, and a nasal consonant. Below are comparison charts of several of the major Indic scripts, accordingly, The charts are not comprehensive. Glyphs may be unrepresented if they dont derive from any Brahmi character, the pronunciations of glyphs in the same column may not be identical

25.
Tibetan alphabet
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The Tibetan alphabet is an abugida used to write the Tibetic languages such as Tibetan, as well as Dzongkha, Sikkimese, Ladakhi, and sometimes Balti. The printed form of the alphabet is called uchen script while the cursive form used in everyday writing is called umê script. The alphabet is closely linked to a broad ethnic Tibetan identity, spanning across areas in Tibet, Bhutan, India. The Tibetan alphabet is of Indic origin and it is ancestral to the Limbu alphabet, the Lepcha alphabet, the creation of the Tibetan alphabet is attributed to Thonmi Sambhota of the mid-7th century. Tradition holds that Thonmi Sambhota, a minister of Songtsen Gampo, was sent to India to study the art of writing, the form of the letters is based on an Indic alphabet of that period. The most important, an official orthography aimed to facilitate the translation of Buddhist scriptures, Standard orthography has not altered since then, while the spoken language has changed by, for example, losing complex consonant clusters. As a result, in all modern Tibetan dialects, in particular in the Standard Tibetan of Lhasa and this divergence is the basis of an argument in favour of spelling reform, to write Tibetan as it is pronounced, for example, writing Kagyu instead of Bka-rgyud. In contrast, the pronunciation of the Balti, Ladakhi and Burig languages adheres more closely to the archaic spelling, in the Tibetan script, the syllables are written from left to right. Syllables are separated by a tsek, since many Tibetan words are monosyllabic, spaces are not used to divide words. The Tibetan alphabet has thirty basic letters, sometimes known as radicals, as in other Indic scripts, each consonant letter assumes an inherent vowel, in the Tibetan script its ཨ /a/. The alphabet ཨ /a/ is also the base for dependent vowels marks, although some Tibetan dialects are tonal, the language had no tone at the time of the scripts invention, and there are no dedicated symbols for tone. However, since tones developed from segmental features they can usually be predicted by the archaic spelling of Tibetan words. The unique aspect of the Tibetan script is that the consonants can be either as radicals, or they can be written in other forms. To understand how this works, one can look at the radical ཀ /ka/, in both cases, the symbol for ཀ /ka/ is used, but when the ར /ra/ is in the middle of the consonant and vowel, it is added as a subscript. On the other hand, when the ར /ra/ comes before the consonant and vowel, ར /ra/ actually changes form when it is above most other consonants, thus རྐ rka. However, an exception to this is the cluster རྙ /rnya/, similarly, the consonants ཝ /wa/, ར /ra/, and ཡ /ja/ change form when they are beneath other consonants, thus ཀྭ /kwa/, ཀྲ /kra/, ཀྱ /kja/. Besides being written as subscripts and superscripts, some consonants can also be placed in prescript, postscript, the third position, the post-postscript position is solely for the consonants ད /tʰa/ and ས /sa/. The superscript position above a radical is reserved for the consonants ར /ra/, ལ /la/, the vowels used in the alphabet are ཨ /a/, ཨི /i/, ཨུ /u/, ཨེ /e/, and ཨོ /o/

26.
Devanagari
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Devanagari, also called Nagari, is an abugida alphabet of India and Nepal. It is written left to right, has a strong preference for symmetrical rounded shapes within squared outlines. The Nagari script has roots in the ancient Brāhmī script family, the Nagari script was in regular use by the 7th century CE and it was fully developed by about the end of first millennium. Nagari has been the primus inter pares of the Indic scripts, the Devanagari script is also used for classical Sanskrit texts. The Devanagari script is closely related to the Nandinagari script commonly found in ancient manuscripts of South India. Devanagari script has forty-seven primary characters, of which fourteen are vowels, the ancient Nagari script for Sanskrit had two additional consonantal characters. The script has no distinction similar to the capital and small letters of the Latin alphabet, generally the orthography of the script reflects the pronunciation of the language. Devanagari is part of the Brahmic family of scripts of India, Nepal, Tibet and it is a descendant of the Gupta script, along with Siddham and Sharada. Medieval inscriptions suggest widespread diffusion of the Nagari-related scripts, with biscripts presenting local script along with the adoption of Nagari scripts, the 7th-century Tibetan king Srong-tsan-gambo ordered that all foreign books be transcribed into the Tibetan language. Other closely related scripts such as Siddham Matrka was in use in Indonesia, Vietnam, Japan, Sharada remained in parallel use in Kashmir. Nāgarī is the Sanskrit feminine of Nāgara relating or belonging to a town or city and it is a phrasing with lipi as nāgarī lipi script relating to a city, or spoken in city. The use of the name devanāgarī is relatively recent, and the older term nāgarī is still common, the rapid spread of the term devanāgarī may be related to the almost exclusive use of this script to publish Sanskrit texts in print since the 1870s. As a Brahmic abugida, the principle of Devanagari is that each letter represents a consonant. This is usually written in Latin as a, though it is represented as in the International Phonetic Alphabet, the letter क is read ka, the two letters कन are kana, the three कनय are kanaya, etc. This cancels the inherent vowel, so that from क्नय knaya is derived क्नय् knay, the halant is often used for consonant clusters when typesetting conjunct ligatures is not feasible. Consonant clusters are written with ligatures, for example, the three consonants क्, न्, and य्, when written consecutively without virāma form कनय, as shown above. Alternatively, they may be joined as clusters to form क्नय knaya, कन्य kanya and this system was originally created for use with the Middle Indo-Aryan languages, which have a very limited number of clusters. When applied to Sanskrit, however, it added a deal of complexity to the script

27.
Canadian Aboriginal syllabics
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Canadian Aboriginal syllabic writing, or simply syllabics, is a family of abugidas used to write a number of Aboriginal Canadian languages of the Algonquian, Inuit, and Athabaskan language families. Canadian syllabics are used to write all of the Cree languages from Naskapi to the Rocky Mountains, including Eastern Cree, Woods Cree, Swampy Cree. They are also used to write Inuktitut in the eastern Canadian Arctic and they are used regionally for the other large Canadian Algonquian language, Ojibwe in Western Canada, as well as for Blackfoot, where they are obsolete. Among the Athabaskan languages further to the west, syllabics have been used at one point or another to write Dakelh, Chipewyan, Slavey, Tłı̨chǫ, syllabics have occasionally been used in the United States by communities that straddle the border, but are principally a Canadian phenomenon. In Cree, for example, the consonant p has the shape of a chevron, in an upward orientation, ᐱ, it transcribes the syllable pi. Inverted, so that it points downwards, ᐯ, it transcribes pe, pointing to the left, ᐸ, it is pa, and to the right, ᐳ, po. The consonant forms and the vowels so represented vary from language to language, *The obsolete sp- series, which is not supported by Unicode, is here represented by Latin and Cyrillic letters, there is no good substitution for spi. The clockwise 90° rotation relates vowels as the later series sh- does, because the script is presented in syllabic charts and learned as a syllabary, it is often considered to be such. This is unlike a syllabary, where each combination of consonant. All were written with a line to show the vowel was short. These were originally written midline, but are now superscripted, the consonants -l and -r were marginal, only found in borrowings, baby talk, and the like. These, and -h, could occur before vowels, but were written with the final shape regardless, the vowels fall into two sets, the back vowels -a and -o, and the front vowels -e and -i. Each set consists of a vowel, -a or -e. In all cases, back-vowel syllables are related through left-right reflection, how they relate to front-vowel syllables depends on the graphic form of the consonants. Symmetrical, vowel, p-, t-, sp-, are rotated 90 degrees counter-clockwise, while those that are asymmetrical top-to-bottom, c-, k-, m-, n-, s-, y-, are rotated 180 degrees. The lower front-vowel syllables are derived this way from the low back-vowel syllables, for example, all scripts except the one for Blackfoot use the triangle for vowel-initial syllables. By 1841, when Evans cast the first movable type for syllabics and he instead filed across the raised lines of the type, leaving gaps in the printed letter for long vowels. This can be seen in early printings, later still a dot diacritic, originally used for vowel length only in handwriting, was extended to print, Thus today ᐊ a contrasts with ᐋ â, and ᒥ mi contrasts with ᒦ mî

28.
Hebrew alphabet
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Historically, there have been two separate abjad scripts to write Hebrew. In the remainder of this article, the term Hebrew alphabet refers to the Jewish square script unless otherwise indicated, the Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters. It does not have case, but five letters have different forms used at the end of a word. Hebrew is written right to left. Originally, the alphabet was an abjad consisting only of consonants, as with other abjads, such as the Arabic alphabet, scribes later devised means of indicating vowel sounds by separate vowel points, known in Hebrew as niqqud. In both biblical and rabbinic Hebrew, the letters א ה ו י‎ are also used as matres lectionis to represent vowels. There is a trend in modern Modern Hebrew toward the use of matres lectionis to indicate vowels that have traditionally gone unwritten, the paleo-Hebrew alphabet was used in the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The Samaritans, who remained in the Land of Israel, continued to use the paleo-Hebrew alphabet, after the fall of the Persian Empire in 330 BCE, Jews used both scripts before settling on the Assyrian form. The square Hebrew alphabet was adapted and used for writing languages of the Jewish diaspora – such as Karaim, the Judeo-Arabic languages, Judaeo-Spanish. In the traditional form, the Hebrew alphabet is an abjad consisting only of consonants and it has 22 letters, five of which use different forms at the end of a word. Also, a system of points to indicate vowels, called niqqud, was developed. In modern forms of the alphabet, as in the case of Yiddish and to some extent Modern Hebrew, today, the trend is toward full spelling with the weak letters acting as true vowels. When used to write Yiddish, vowels are indicated, using letters, either with or without niqqud-diacritics, except for Hebrew words. To preserve the proper vowel sounds, scholars developed several different sets of vocalization, one of these, the Tiberian system, eventually prevailed. Aaron ben Moses ben Asher, and his family for generations, are credited for refining and maintaining the system. These points are used only for special purposes, such as Biblical books intended for study. The Tiberian system also includes a set of marks, called trope. These are shown below the normal form in the following table, although Hebrew is read and written from right to left, the following table shows the letters in order from left to right

29.
Pahlavi scripts
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Pahlavi or Pahlevi denotes a particular and exclusively written form of various Middle Iranian languages. The essential characteristics of Pahlavi are the use of a specific Aramaic-derived script, the Pahlavi script, Pahlavi compositions have been found for the dialects/ethnolects of Parthia, Persis, Sogdiana, Scythia, and Khotan. Independent of the variant for which the Pahlavi system was used, Pahlavi is then an admixture of written Imperial Aramaic, from which Pahlavi derives its script, logograms, and some of its vocabulary. Spoken Middle Iranian, from which Pahlavi derives its terminations, symbol rules, Pahlavi may thus be defined as a system of writing applied to a specific language group, but with critical features alien to that language group. It has the characteristics of a language, but is not one. It is a written system, but much Pahlavi literature remains essentially an oral literature committed to writing. If this etymology is correct, Parthav presumably became pahlaw through a semivowel glide rt change to l, the term has been traced back further to Avestan pərəthu- broad, also evident in Sanskrit pŗthvi- earth and parthivi of the earth. Common to all Indo-Iranian languages is a connotation of mighty, the earliest attested use of Pahlavi dates to the reign of Arsaces I of Parthia in early Parthian coins with Pahlavi scripts. There are also several Pahlavi texts written during the reign of Mithridates I, such fragments, as also the rock inscriptions of Sassanid kings, which are datable to the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, do not, however, qualify as a significant literary corpus. It is in an archaic script than Book Pahlavi. After the Muslim conquest of Persia, the Pahlavi script was replaced by the Arabic script, except in Zoroastrian sacred literature, the replacement of the Pahlavi script with the Arabic script in order to write the Persian language was done by the Tahirids in 9th century Khurasan. In the present-day, Pahlavi is frequently identified with the dialect of south-west Iran, formerly and properly called Pārsi. This practice can be dated to the immediately following the Islamic conquest. Tables showing the letters and their names or pronunciations are available on line, the Pahlavi script is one of the two essential characteristics of the Pahlavi system. Its origin and development occurred independently of the various Middle Iranian languages for which it was used, the Pahlavi script is derived from the Aramaic script as it was used under the Achaemenids, with modifications to support the phonology of the Iranian languages. It is essentially a typical abjad, where, in general, only vowels are marked with matres lectionis. In addition to this, during much of its later history, similarly, certain words continued to be spelt with postvocalic ⟨s⟩ and ⟨t⟩ even after the consonants had been debuccalized to ⟨h⟩ in the living language. The Pahlavi script consisted of two widely used forms, Inscriptional Pahlavi and Book Pahlavi, a third form, Psalter Pahlavi, is not widely attested

30.
Avestan alphabet
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The Avestan alphabet is a writing system developed during Irans Sassanid era to render the Avestan language. As a side effect of its development, the script was used for Pazend. In the texts of Zoroastrian tradition, the alphabet is referred to as din dabireh or din dabiri, the development of the Avestan alphabet was initiated by the need to represent recited Avestan language texts correctly. The various text collections that constitute the canon of Zoroastrian scripture are the result of a collation that occurred in the 4th century. It is likely that the Avestan alphabet was an ad hoc innovation related to this – Sassanid archetype – collation and this they passed on to their pupils in turn, so preserving for many generations the correct way to recite scripture. This was necessary because the priesthood considered precise and correct enunciation, further, the recitation of the liturgy was accompanied by ritual activity that leaves no room to attend to a written text. The development of the Avestan alphabet allowed these commentaries to interleave quotation of scripture with explanation thereof, the direct effect of these texts was a standardized interpretation of scripture that survives to the present day. For scholarship these texts are enormously interesting since they occasionally preserve passages that have otherwise been lost, though the existence of an Arsacid archetype is not impossible, it has proved to contribute nothing to Avestan philology. In contrast, Avestan was an alphabet, with explicit characters for vowels. The alphabet included many characters from cursive Pahlavi, while some are characters only exist in the Psalter Pahlavi variant. Some of the vowels, such as ə appear to derive from Greek minuscules, Avestan o is a special form of Pahlavi l that exists only in Aramaic signs. Avestan script, like Pahlavi script and Aramaic script also, is written right to left. In Avestan script, letters are not connected, and ligatures are rare, fossey lists altogether 16 ligatures, but most are formed by the interaction of swash tails. Words and the end of the first part of a compound are separated by a dot, beyond that, punctuation is weak or non-existent in the manuscripts, and in the 1880s Karl Friedrich Geldner had to devise one for standardized transcription. Two above and one below signify — in ascending order of dot size — colon, semicolon, one above and two below signify turned end of sentence and turned end of section. In total, the Avestan alphabet has 37 consonants and 16 vowels, there are two main transcription schemes for Avestan, the older style used by Christian Bartholomae, and the newer style used by Karl Hoffmann. Later, when writing Middle Persian in the script, another consonant was added to it to represent the /l/ phoneme that didnt exist in the Avestan language, the Avestan alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard in October,2009 with the release of version 5.2. The characters are encoded at U+10B00—10B35 for letters and U+10B38—10B3F for punctuation, Avestan alphabet, Omniglot Pahlavi alphabet, Omniglot

31.
Palmyrene alphabet
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Palmyrene was a historical Semitic alphabet used to write the local Palmyrene dialect of Aramaic. It was used between 100 BCE and 300 CE in Palmyra in the Syrian desert, the oldest surviving Palmyrene inscription dates to 44 BCE. The last surviving inscription dates to 274 CE, two years after Palmyra was sacked by Roman Emperor Aurelian, ending the Palmyrene Empire, use of the Palmyrene language and script declined, being replaced with Greek and Latin. Two forms of Palmyrene were developed, The rounded, cursive form derived from the Aramaic alphabet and later a decorative, both the cursive and monumental forms commonly used typographic ligatures. Palmyrene used a system which built up numbers using combinations of their symbols for 1,2,3,4,5,10. It is similar to the used for Aramaic which built numbers using their symbols for 1,2,3,10,20,100,1000. There are some styles in which the r-letter is the same as the d-letter with a dot on top, ligation after b, ḥ, m, n, and q before some other consonants was common in some inscriptions but was not obligatory. There are also two fleurons that tend to appear near numbers, examples of Palmyrene inscriptions were printed as far back as 1616 but accurate copies of Palmyrene/Greek bilingual inscriptions were not available until 1756. The Palmyrene alphabet was deciphered in the 1750s, literally overnight, by Abbé Jean-Jacques Barthélemy using these new, Palmyrene was added to the Unicode Standard in June,2014 with the release of version 7.0. The Unicode block for Palmyrene is U+10860–U+1087F

32.
Syriac alphabet
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The Syriac alphabet is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language from the 1st century AD. Syriac is written right to left. It is a script where some, but not all. The alphabet consists of 22 letters, all of which are consonants, the vowel sounds are supplied either by the readers memory or by optional diacritic marks. In addition to the sounds of the language, the letters of the Syriac alphabet can be used to represent numbers in a similar to Hebrew. When Arabic began to be the dominant spoken language in the Fertile Crescent, Malayalam was also written with Syriac script and was called Suriyani Malayalam. These writings are usually called Karshuni or Garshuni, Garshuni is often used today by Neo-Aramaic speakers in written communication such as letters and fliers. There are three variants of the Syriac alphabet, ʾEsṭrangēlā, Maḏnḥāyā, and Serṭā. The oldest and classical form of the alphabet is ʾEsṭrangēlā, although ʾEsṭrangēlā is no longer used as the main script for writing Syriac, it has received some revival since the 10th century. It is often used in publications, in titles and inscriptions. In some older manuscripts and inscriptions it is possible for any letter to join to the left, vowel marks are usually not used with ʾEsṭrangēlā. The East Syriac dialect is written in the Maḏnḥāyā form of the alphabet. Other names for the script include Swāḏāyā, ʾĀṯūrāyā, Kaldāyā, the Eastern script resembles ʾEsṭrangēlā more closely than the Western script, being somewhat a midway point between the two. Some transliteration schemes find its inclusion necessary for showing spirantization or for historical reasons, whether because its distribution is mostly predictable or because its pronunciation was lost, neither the East nor West variants of the alphabet have a sign to represent the schwa. The West Syriac dialect is written in the Serṭā form of the alphabet, also known as the Pšīṭā, Maronite. Most of the letters are derived from ʾEsṭrangēlā, but are simplified. A cursive, chancery hand is evidenced in the earliest Syriac manuscripts, from the 8th century, the simpler Serṭā style came into fashion, perhaps because of its more economical use of parchment. The Nabataean alphabet was based on this form of Syriac handwriting, lowercase Omega, used only in the vocative interjection ʾō

33.
Nabataean alphabet
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The Nabataean alphabet is a consonantal alphabet that was used by the Nabataeans in the 2nd century BC. Important inscriptions are found in Petra, Jordan, and Sinai, the alphabet is descended from the Syriac alphabet, which was itself descended from the Aramaic alphabet. As compared to other Aramaic-derived scripts, Nabataean developed more loops and ligatures, the ligatures seem to have not been standardized and vary across time and space. There were no spaces between words, numerals in Nabataean script were built from characters of 1,2,3,4,5,10,20, and 100. Note that the Syriac and Arabic alphabets are always cursive and that some of their letters look different in medial or initial position, see Aramaic alphabet § Letters for a more detailed comparison of letterforms. The Nabataean alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard in June 2014 with the release of version 7.0

34.
Arabic alphabet
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The Arabic alphabet or Arabic abjadiyah is the Arabic script as it is codified for writing the Arabic language. It is written right to left, in a cursive style. Originally, the alphabet was an abjad consisting only of consonants, as with other abjads, such as the Hebrew alphabet, scribes later devised means of indicating vowel sounds by separate vowel points. The basic Arabic alphabet contains 28 letters, there are no distinct upper and lower case letter forms. Many letters look similar but are distinguished from one another by dots above or below their central part and these dots are an integral part of a letter, since they distinguish between letters that represent different sounds. For example, the Arabic letters transliterated as b and t have the basic shape, but b has one dot below, ب. Both printed and written Arabic are cursive, with most of the letters within a word connected to the adjacent letters. There are two main collating sequences for the Arabic alphabet, abjad and hija, in this order, letters are also used as numbers, Abjad numerals, and possess the same alphanumeric code/cipher as Hebrew gematria and Greek isopsephy. The hijā’ī or alifbā’ī order, used where lists of names and words are sorted, as in phonebooks, classroom lists, and dictionaries, groups letters by similarity of shape. Loss of sameḵ was compensated for by the split of shin ש into two independent Arabic letters, ش and ﺱ which moved up to take the place of sameḵ, the six other letters that do not correspond to any north Semitic letter are placed at the end. This is commonly vocalized as follows, abjad hawwaz ḥuṭṭī kalaman sa‘faṣ qarashat thakhadh ḍaẓagh, the hijā’ī order is never used as numerals. Another kind of order was used widely in the Maghreb until recently when it was replaced by the Mashriqi order. The Arabic alphabet is always cursive and letters vary in shape depending on their position within a word, letters can exhibit up to four distinct forms corresponding to an initial, medial, final, or isolated position. While some letters show considerable variations, others remain almost identical across all four positions, generally, letters in the same word are linked together on both sides by short horizontal lines, but six letters can only be linked to their preceding letter. For example, أرارات has only isolated forms because each letter cannot be connected to its following one, in addition, some letter combinations are written as ligatures, notably lām-alif. Notes See the article Romanization of Arabic for details on various schemes, however. Also names are transcribed as pronounced locally, not as pronounced in Literary Arabic. Regarding pronunciation, the values given are those of Modern Standard Arabic

35.
N'Ko alphabet
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NKo is both a script devised by Solomana Kante in 1949, as a writing system for the Manding languages of West Africa, and the name of the literary language written in that script. The term NKo means I say in all Manding languages, the script has a few similarities to the Arabic script, notably its direction and the letters which are connected at the base. Unlike Arabic, it obligatorily marks both tone and vowels, NKo tones are marked as diacritics, in a similar manner to the marking of some vowels in Arabic. Kante created NKo in response to what he felt were beliefs that Africans were a people, because before then. NKo came first into use in Kankan, Guinea, as a Maninka alphabet and was disseminated from there into other Mande-speaking parts of West Africa, NKo Alphabet Day is April 14, relating to the date in 1949 when the script is believed to have been finalized. The introduction of the led to a movement promoting literacy in the NKo alphabet among Mande speakers in both Anglophone and Francophone West Africa. NKo literacy was instrumental in shaping the Mandinka cultural identity in Guinea, literate and a former priest in his home country, Tamerlan wrote down the name of his writing in 3 letters that Haitian researcher Rodney Salnave judged to be NKo. As of 2005, it is used mainly in Guinea and the Ivory Coast and it has been classed as the most successful of the West African scripts. The literary language used is intended as a koiné blending elements of the principal Manding languages, in some cases, such as with Bambara in Mali, promoting literacy using this orthography has led to a fair degree of literacy in it. Arabic transcription is used for Mandinka in The Gambia and Senegal. There has also been documented use of NKo for traditional religious publications in the Yoruba and Fon languages of Benin, the NKo alphabet is written from right to left, with letters being connected to one another. NKo uses diacritical marks to denote tonality and vowel length, together with plain vowels, NKo distinguishes four tones, high, low, ascending, and descending, and two vowel lengths, long and short. However no mark exists for a short, descending tone, with the increasing use of computers and the subsequent desire to provide universal access to information technology, the challenge arose of developing ways to use Nko on computers. From the 1990s on, there were efforts to develop fonts and even web content by adapting other software, a DOS word processor named Koma Kuda was developed by Prof. Baba Mamadi Diané from Cairo University. However the lack of intercompatibility inherent in such solutions was a block to further development, pango 1.18 and GNOME2.20 have native support for the Nko languages. An iOS calculator in Nko, Nko, Calc, is available on the Apple App Store, an iOS app for sending email in Nko is available, Triage-Nko. There is a virtual keyboard named virtual-keyboard-nko to type Nko characters on Windows operating system, an N’Ko font, Conakry, is available for Windows 8, macOS, and OpenOffice-LibreOffice’s Graphite engine, which was developed by SIL International. NKo script was added to the Unicode Standard in July 2006 with the release of version 5.0, uNESCOs Programme Initiative B@bel supported preparing a proposal to encode NKo in Unicode

36.
Sogdian alphabet
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The Sogdian alphabet was originally used for the Sogdian language, a language in the Iranian family used by the people of Sogdia. The alphabet is derived from Syriac, the descendant script of the Aramaic alphabet, the Sogdian alphabet is one of three scripts used to write the Sogdian language, the others being the Manichaean alphabet and the Syriac alphabet. It was used throughout Central Asia, from the edge of Iran in the west, to China in the east, like the writing systems from which it is descended, the Sogdian writing system can be described as an abjad, but it also displays tendencies towards an alphabet. The script consists of 17 consonants, many of which have alternate forms for initial, middle, as in the Aramaic alphabet, long vowels were commonly written with matres lectionis, the consonants aleph, yodh and waw. However, unlike Aramaic and most abjads, these consonant signs would also serve to express the short vowels. To disambiguate long vowels from short ones, an additional aleph could be written before the sign denoting the long vowel, the alphabet also includes several diacritics, which were used inconsistently. It is written right to left, but by the time it had evolved into its child system. Voiced and voiceless fricatives are not distinguished in the script. Aramaic logograms also appear in the script, remnants of adapting the Aramaic alphabet to the Sogdian language and these logograms are used mainly for functional words such as pronouns, articles, prepositions, and conjunctions. * those letters are not used in Sogdian words, Early Sogdian dates to the early fourth century C. E. and is characterized by distinct, separated graphemes. The sutra script appears around 500 C. E. while the cursive script develops approximately a century later, the cursive script is thus named because its letters are connected with a base line. Since many letters in the script are extremely similar in form, to the point of being indistinguishable. As the Sogdian alphabet became more cursive and more stylized, some became more difficult to distinguish, or were distinguished only in final position. The Sogdian script is known from texts of Buddhism, Manichaeism, and Christianity, as well as from secular sources such as letters, coins. The oldest known Sogdian documents are the Ancient Letters, found in 1920 by Sir Aurel Stein in a watchtower near Dunhuang and these letters date to approximately 312-313 C. E. and are written in Early Sogdian. The Sogdian Buddhist texts, written in the script, are younger. They were found during the first two decades of the century in one of the caves of the Thousand Buddhas in the Chinese province of Gansu. The bulk of these reside in the British Museum, the Bibliothèque nationale de France

37.
Old Turkic alphabet
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The Old Turkic script is the alphabet used by the Göktürks and other early Turkic khanates during the 8th to 10th centuries to record the Old Turkic language. The script is named after the Orkhon Valley in Mongolia where early 8th-century inscriptions were discovered in an 1889 expedition by Nikolai Yadrintsev and these Orkhon inscriptions were published by Vasily Radlov and deciphered by the Danish philologist Vilhelm Thomsen in 1893. This writing system was used within the Uyghur Khaganate. Additionally, a Yenisei variant is known from 9th-century Yenisei Kirghiz inscriptions, and it has cousins in the Talas Valley of Turkestan. Words were usually written from right to left, another explanation of the scripts origin aside from derivation from tamgas, an alternate possible derivation from Chinese characters was suggested by Vilhelm Thomsen in 1893. The same sources tell that when the Xiongnu noted down something or transmitted a message, they made cuts on a piece of wood, at the Noin-Ula burial site and other Hun burial sites in Mongolia and regions north of Lake Baikal, the artifacts displayed over twenty carved characters. Most of these characters are identical with or very similar to the letters of the Turkic Orkhon script. Contemporary Chinese sources conflict as to whether the Turks had a language by the 6th century. The Book of Zhou, dating to the 7th century, mentions that the Turks had a language similar to that of the Sogdians. Two other sources, the Book of Sui and the History of the Northern Dynasties claim that the Turks did not have a written language, the Old Turkic corpus consists of about two hundred inscriptions, plus a number of manuscripts. The texts are mostly epitaphs, but there are also graffiti, the most famous of the inscriptions are the two monuments which were erected in the Orkhon Valley between 732 and 735 in honor of the Göktürk prince Kül Tigin and his brother the emperor Bilge Kağan. The Tonyukuk inscription, a monument situated somewhat farther east, is slightly earlier and these inscriptions relate in epic language the legendary origins of the Turks, the golden age of their history, their subjugation by the Chinese, and their liberation by Bilge. They include Irk Bitig, a 9th-century manuscript book on divination, Old Turkic being a synharmonic language, a number of consonant signs are divided into two synharmonic sets, one for front vowels and the other for back vowels. Such vowels can be taken as intrinsic to the consonant sign, in these cases, it is customary to use superscript numerals ¹ and ² to mark consonant signs used with back and front vowels, respectively. This convention was introduced by Thomsen, and followed by Gabain, Malov, synharmonic sets Other consonantal signs A word separator, is sometimes used. A reading example, transliterated t²ṅr²i, this spells the name of the Turkic sky god, variants of the script were found from Mongolia and Xinjiang in the east to the Balkans in the west. The preserved inscriptions were dated to between the 8th and 10th centuries, Talas inscriptions include Terek-Say rock inscriptions found in the 1897, Koysary text, Bakaiyr gorge inscriptions, Kalbak-Tash 6 and 12 inscriptions, Talas alphabet has 29 identified letters. The Eurasiatic group is divided into five related alphabets, Achiktash

38.
Old Hungarian alphabet
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The Old Hungarian script is an alphabetic writing system used for writing the Hungarian language. Today Hungarian is predominantly written using the Latin-based Hungarian alphabet, the term old refers to the historical priority of the script compared to the Latin-based one. The Hungarians settled the Carpathian Basin in 895, after the establishment of the Christian Hungarian kingdom, the old writing was partly forced out of use and the Latin alphabet was adopted. However, among some professions and in Transylvania, the script has remained in use by the Székely Magyars, the writing could also be found in churches like the one in Atid. The Old Hungarian script has also described as runic or runiform because it is superficially reminiscent of the Germanic runic alphabet. Its English name in the ISO15924 standard is Old Hungarian, in modern Hungarian, the script is known formally as Székely rovásírás. The writing system is known as rovásírás, székely rovásírás. Scientists can not give a date nor an origin which is known for the script. Proto-Rovas from 5300 BC can be seen at the Tărtăria tablets according to Klára Friedrich, attila Grandpierre describes the incision of an axe socket found in the plains of Campagna, near Rome, that was made around 1000 BC. András Róna-Tas derives Old Hungarian from the Old Turkic script, itself recorded in inscriptions dating from c, the origins of the Turkic scripts are uncertain. The scripts may derived from Asian scripts such as the Pahlavi and Sogdian alphabets, or possibly from Kharosthi, or alternatively, according to some opinions, ancient Turkic runes descend from primaeval Turkic graphic logograms. All the letters but one for sounds which were shared by Turkic, most of the missing characters were derived by script internal extensions, rather than borrowings, but a small number of characters seem to derive from Greek, such as eF. Although there have been attempts to interpret it, the meaning of it is still unclear. In 1000, with the coronation of Stephen I of Hungary, Hungary became a Kingdom, the Latin alphabet was adopted as official script, however Old Hungarian continued to be used in the vernacular. In Royal Hungary, Old Hungarian script was used less, although there are relics from this territory, there is another copy – similar to the Nikolsburg Alphabet – of the Old Hungarian alphabet, dated 1609. The inscription from Énlaka, dated 1668, is an example of the art use. It also contains Hungarian texts written with runes, for example, in the 19th century scholars began to research the rules and the other features of the Old Hungarian script. Because the Old Hungarian script had been replaced by Latin, linguistic researchers in the 20th century had to reconstruct the alphabet from historic sources, Gyula Sebestyén, ethnographer, folklorist and Gyula Németh, philologist, linguist, turcologist did the lions share of this work

39.
Old Uyghur alphabet
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The Old Uyghur alphabet was used for writing the Old Uyghur language, a variety of Old Turkic spoken in Turfan and Gansu that is an ancestor of the modern Yugur language. It was an adaptation of the Aramaic alphabet used for texts with Buddhist, the last known manuscripts are dated to the 18th century. This was the prototype for the Mongolian and Manchu alphabets, the Old Uyghur alphabet was brought to Mongolia by Tata-tonga. Like the Sogdian alphabet, the Old Uyghur tended to use matres lectionis for the vowels as well as for the short ones. The practice of leaving short vowels unrepresented was almost completely abandoned, thus, while ultimately deriving from a Semitic abjad, the Old Uyghur alphabet can be said to have been largely alphabetized. Uyghur alphabets Gorelova, Liliya M. Manchu Grammar, Old Uyghur Alphabet on Omniglot Old Uyghur alphabet and Orkhon Turkic alphabet photos of the original text fragments written in Old Uyghur script discovered at Turpan

40.
Mongolian script
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Derived from Sogdian, Mongolian is a true alphabet, with separate letters for consonants and vowels. The Mongolian script has adapted to write languages such as Oirat. Alphabets based on this classical vertical script are used in Inner Mongolia and other parts of China to this day to write Mongolian, Xibe and, experimentally, the Mongolian vertical script developed as an adaptation of the Sogdian to the Mongolian language. From the seventh and eighth to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in the western dialect, materials of the Arab-Mongolian and Persian-Mongolian dictionaries, Mongolian texts in Arabic transcription, etc. The development over this period explains why Mongolian script looks like a vertical Arabic script, zain was dropped as it was redundant for. Various schools of orthography, some using diacritics, were developed to avoid ambiguity, the Uyghur script and its descendants—Mongolian, Oirat Clear, Manchu, and Buryat—are the only vertical scripts written from left to right. Mongols learned their script as a syllabary, dividing the syllables into twelve different classes, based on the final phonemes of the syllables, all of which ended in vowels. The Manchus followed the same syllabic method when learning Manchu script, Manchus when learning, instead of saying l, a---la, l, o---lo, etc. were taught at once to say la, lo, etc. Many more syllables than are contained in their syllabary might have formed with their letters. Manchu children were taught the language via the syllabic method, some westerners learn the script in an alphabetic manner instead. Today, the opinion on whether it is alphabet or syllabic in nature is still split between different experts, in China, it is considered syllabic and Manchu is still taught in this manner. The alphabetic approach is used mainly by foreigners who want to learn the language, studying Manchu script as a syllabary takes a longer time. The Traditional Mongolian script is known by a variety of names. Due to its shape like Uighur script, it known as the Uighurjin Mongol script. The name Old Mongol script stuck, and it is known as such among the older generation. It does not distinguish several vowels and consonants that were not required for Uyghur, the result is somewhat comparable to the situation of English, which must represent ten or more vowels with only five letters and uses the digraph th for two distinct sounds. Ambiguity is sometimes prevented by context, as the requirements of vowel harmony, moreover, as there are few words with an exactly identical spelling, actual ambiguities are rare for a reader who knows the orthography. Letters have different forms depending on their position in a word, initial, medial, in some cases, additional graphic variants are selected for visual harmony with the subsequent character

41.
Mandaic alphabet
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The Mandaic alphabet is based on the Aramaic alphabet, and is used for writing the Mandaic language. The Mandaic name for the script is Abagada or Abaga, after the first letters of the alphabet, rather than the ancient Semitic names for the letters, the letters are known as â, bâ, gâ and so on. The alphabet consists of 24 letters, the 22 letters of the Aramaic alphabet, as the number 24 is auspicious for Mandaeans, the additional letters are somewhat artificial. The 23rd letter is adu, the relative particle, the 24th is the first letter, a, repeated. Thus, Mandaeans say that the abagada has perfected the alpha, unlike most other Semitic alphabets, the vowels are usually written out in full. The first and last letter, a, is used to represent a range of open vowels, the sixth letter, wa, is used for close back vowels, and the tenth letter, ya is used for close front vowels. These last two can also serve as the consonants w/v and y. The eighth letter corresponds to the Semitic heth, and is called eh, a similar situation exists for the sixteenth letter, e, which usually represents e at the beginning of a word or, when followed by wa or ya, represents initial u or i respectively. All the letters in the Mandaic alphabet are considered by Mandaeans to have magic properties, a hint at a few of these meanings is given alongside the respective letters. Postclassical and modern Mandaic uses a lot of Persian words, four additional letters are used in writing nonclassical words. They are, in fact, simple modifications of the canonical letters and are not considered to bring the sum of letters to 28. The letters gha, dha, fa and ja are produced by placing two horizontally-aligned dots under ga, da, pa and sha, respectively and they can be compared to the four novel letters in the Persian alphabet, and the eighteen novel letters in the Sindhi alphabet. The Mandaic alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard in October,2010 with the release of version 6.0, the Unicode block for Mandaic is U+0840–U+085F, Ginza Rabba-English Translation Dictionary, English-Mandaic-English Dictionary, Arabic-Mandaic-Arabic I learn Mandaic Everson, Michael. Proposal for encoding the Mandaic script in the BMP of the UCS - ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 N3485R

42.
Old Italic script
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Old Italic is one of several now extinct alphabet systems used on the Italian Peninsula in ancient times for various Indo-European languages and non-Indo-European languages. The alphabets derive from the Euboean Greek Cumaean alphabet, used at Ischia, various Indo-European languages belonging to the Italic branch originally used the alphabet. Faliscan, Oscan, Umbrian, North Picene, and South Picene all derive from an Etruscan form of the alphabet, the Germanic runic alphabet was derived from one of these alphabets by the 2nd century AD. It is not clear whether the process of adaptation from the Greek alphabet took place in Italy from the first colony of Greeks and it was in any case a Western Greek alphabet. In the alphabets of the West, X had the value, Ψ stood for, in Etruscan. Until about 600 BC, the form of the Etruscan alphabet remained practically unchanged. From the 6th century, however, the alphabet evolved, adjusting to the phonology of the Etruscan language and its origin is disputed, it may have been an altered B or H or an ex novo creation. Its sound value was /f/ and it replaced the Etruscan FH, some letters were, on the other hand, falling out of use, B and D were apparently considered superfluous over P and T. K was dropped in favour of G. O disappeared and was replaced by U, in the course of its simplification, the redundant letters showed some tendency towards a syllabary, C, K and Q were predominantly used in the contexts CE, KA, QU. This classical alphabet remained in use until the 2nd century BC when it began to be influenced by the rise of the Latin alphabet, soon after, the Etruscan language itself became extinct. U came to be used to represent Oscan o, while Ú was used for actual Oscan u, the Nucerian alphabet is based on inscriptions found in southern Italy. It is attested only between the 6th and the 5th century BC, the most important sign is the /S/, shaped like a fir tree, and possibly a derivation from the Phoenician alphabet. U /u/ and V /w/ are distinguished, Θ is probably for /t/ and X for /g/. There are claims of a related script discovered in Glozel, the alphabet of Sanzeno, about 100 Raetic inscriptions. The alphabet of Magrè, east Raetian inscriptions, alphabet of Este, Similar but not identical to that of Magrè, Venetic inscriptions. Inscripted abecedarium on rock engraves in Valle Camonica, the South Picene alphabet, known from the 6th century BCE, is most like the southern Etruscan alphabet in that it uses Q for /k/ and K for /g/. It is, ⟨. ⟩ is a reduced ⟨o⟩ and ⟨, ⟩ is a reduced ⟨8⟩, the Old Italic alphabets were unified and added to the Unicode Standard in March,2001 with the release of version 3.1. The Unicode block for Old Italic is U+10300–U+1032F without specification of a particular alphabet, writing direction varies based on the language and even the time period

43.
Latin alphabet
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The Latin alphabet is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world. It is the script of the English language and is often referred to simply as the alphabet in English. It is an alphabet which originated in the 7th century BC in Italy and has changed continually over the last 2500 years. It has roots in the Semitic alphabet and its offshoot alphabets, the Phoenician, Greek, the phonetic values of some letters changed, some letters were lost and gained, and several writing styles developed. Two such styles, the minuscule and majuscule hands, were combined into one script with alternate forms for the lower and upper case letters, due to classicism, modern uppercase letters differ only slightly from their classical counterparts. The Latin alphabet started out as uppercase serifed letters known as roman square capitals, the lowercase letters evolved through cursive styles that developed to adapt the formerly inscribed alphabet to being written with a pen. Throughout the ages, many stylistic variations of each letter have evolved that are still identified as being the same letter. From the Cumae alphabet, the Etruscan alphabet was derived, the Latins ultimately adopted 21 of the original 26 Etruscan letters. Gaius Julius Hyginus, who recorded much Roman mythology, mentions in Fab, the Parcae, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos invented seven Greek letters — A B H T I Y. Others say that Mercury invented them from the flight of cranes, which, palamedes, too, son of Nauplius, invented eleven letters, Simonides, too, invented four letters — Ó E Z PH, Epicharmus of Sicily, two — P and PS. The Greek letters Mercury is said to have brought to Egypt, Cadmus in exile from Arcadia, took them to Italy, and his mother Carmenta changed them to Latin to the number of 15. Apollo on the added the rest. The original Latin alphabet was, The oldest Latin inscriptions do not distinguish between /ɡ/ and /k/, representing both by C, K and Q according to position, K was used before A, Q was used before O or V, C was used elsewhere. This is explained by the fact that the Etruscan language did not make this distinction, C originated as a turned form of Greek Gamma and Q from Greek Koppa. In later Latin, K survived only in a few such as Kalendae, Q survived only before V. G was later invented to distinguish between /ɡ/ and /k/, it was simply a C with an additional diacritic. C stood for /ɡ/ I stood for both /i/ and /j/, V stood for both /u/ and /w/. K was marginalized in favour of C, which stood for both /ɡ/ and /k/

44.
Cherokee syllabary
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The Cherokee syllabary is a syllabary invented by Sequoyah to write the Cherokee language in the late 1810s and early 1820s. His creation of the syllabary is particularly noteworthy in that he could not previously read any script and he first experimented with logograms, but his system later developed into a syllabary. In his system, each represents a syllable rather than a single phoneme. Although some symbols resemble Latin, Greek and Cyrillic letters, the relationship between symbols and sounds is different, each of the characters represents one syllable, as in the Japanese kana and the Bronze Age Greek Linear B writing systems. The first six characters represent isolated vowel syllables, characters for combined consonant and vowel syllables then follow. The charts below show the syllabary in recitation order, left to right, top to bottom as arranged by Samuel Worcester and he played a key role in the development of Cherokee printing from 1828 until his death in 1859. In the image, the Latin letter ‘v’ in the transcriptions, in the last column, represents a nasal vowel, the Cherokee character Ꮩ do is shown upside-down in some fonts. It should be oriented in the way as the Latin letter V. Note that the 86th character is obsolete, there is also a handwritten cursive form of the syllabary, notably, the handwritten glyphs bear little resemblance to the printed forms. The phonetic values of these characters do not equate directly to those represented by the letters of the Latin script, some characters represent two distinct phonetic values, while others may represent multiple variations of the same syllable. Not all phonemic distinctions of the language are represented. For example, while /d/ + vowel syllables are mostly differentiated from /t/+vowel by use of different graphs, also, long vowels are not ordinarily distinguished from short vowels, tones are not marked, and there is no regular rule for representing consonant clusters. However, in more recent technical literature, length of vowels can actually be indicated using a colon. Six distinctive vowel qualities are represented in the Cherokee syllabary based on where they are pronounced in the mouth, including the vowels i and u, mid vowels e, v, and o. The syllabary also does not distinguish among syllables that end in vowels, h, for example, the single symbol, Ꮡ, is used to represent su in su, dali, meaning six. This same symbol Ꮡ represents suh as in suhdi, meaning fishhook, therefore, there is no differentiation among the symbols used for syllables ending in a single vowel versus that vowel plus h. When consonants other than s, h, or glottal stop arise with other consonants in clusters and this dummy vowel is not pronounced and is either chosen arbitrarily or for etymological reasons. For example, ᏧᎾᏍᏗ represents the word ju, nsdi, meaning small, ns in this case is the consonant cluster that requires the following dummy vowel, a

45.
Runes
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The Scandinavian variants are also known as futhark or fuþark, the Anglo-Saxon variant is futhorc or fuþorc. Runology is the study of the runic alphabets, runic inscriptions, runestones, runology forms a specialised branch of Germanic linguistics. The earliest runic inscriptions date from around 150 AD, the characters were generally replaced by the Latin alphabet as the cultures that had used runes underwent Christianisation, by approximately 700 AD in central Europe and 1100 AD in northern Europe. However, the use of runes persisted for specialized purposes in northern Europe, until the early 20th century, runes were used in rural Sweden for decorative purposes in Dalarna and on Runic calendars. The three best-known runic alphabets are the Elder Futhark, the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, and the Younger Futhark, the Younger Futhark is divided further into the long-branch runes, short-branch or Rök runes, and the stavlösa or Hälsinge runes. The Younger Futhark developed further into the Medieval runes, and the Dalecarlian runes, historically, the runic alphabet is a derivation of the Old Italic scripts of antiquity, with the addition of some innovations. Which variant of the Old Italic family in particular gave rise to the runes is uncertain, suggestions include Raetic, Venetic, Etruscan, or Old Latin as candidates. At the time, all of these scripts had the same angular letter shapes suited for epigraphy, the process of transmission of the script is unknown. The oldest inscriptions are found in Denmark and northern Germany, not near Italy, a West Germanic hypothesis suggests transmission via Elbe Germanic groups, while a Gothic hypothesis presumes transmission via East Germanic expansion. The runes were in use among the Germanic peoples from the 1st or 2nd century AD, no distinction is made in surviving runic inscriptions between long and short vowels, although such a distinction was certainly present phonologically in the spoken languages of the time. Similarly, there are no signs for labiovelars in the Elder Futhark The term runes is used to distinguish these symbols from Latin and it is attested on a 6th-century Alamannic runestaff as runa and possibly as runo on the 4th-century Einang stone. The name comes from the Germanic root run-, meaning secret or whisper, in Old Irish Gaelic, the word rún means mystery, secret, intention or affectionate love. Similarly in Welsh and Old English, the word rhin and rūn respectively means mystery, secret, secret writing, or sometimes in the sense of the word. Ogham is a Celtic script, similarly carved in the Norse manner, the root run- can also be found in the Baltic languages, meaning speech. In Lithuanian, runoti means both to cut and to speak, according to another theory, the Germanic root comes from the Indoeuropean root *reuə- dig. The Finnish term for rune, riimukirjain, means scratched letter, the Finnish word runo means poem and comes from the same source as the English word rune, it is a very old loan of the Proto-Germanic *rūnō. The runes developed centuries after the Old Italic alphabets from which they are historically derived. The formation of the Elder Futhark was complete by the early 5th century, specifically, the Raetic alphabet of Bolzano is often advanced as a candidate for the origin of the runes, with only five Elder Futhark runes having no counterpart in the Bolzano alphabet

46.
Ogham
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Ogham is an Early Medieval alphabet used to write the early Irish language, and later the Old Irish language. There are roughly 400 surviving orthodox inscriptions on monuments throughout Ireland and western Britain. The largest number outside Ireland are in Pembrokeshire, Wales, the vast majority of the inscriptions consist of personal names. According to the High Medieval Bríatharogam, names of trees can be ascribed to individual letters. The etymology of the word ogam or ogham remains unclear, one possible origin is from the Irish og-úaim point-seam, referring to the seam made by the point of a sharp weapon. It has been argued that the earliest inscriptions in ogham date to about the 4th century AD and it appears that the ogham alphabet arose from another script, and some even consider it a mere cipher of its template script. The largest number of scholars favours the Latin alphabet as this template, although the Elder Futhark and even the Greek alphabet have their supporters. Runic origin would explain the presence of H and Z letters unused in Irish, as well as the presence of vocalic and consonantal variants U vs. W, unknown to Latin writing. In Ireland and in Wales, the language of the stone inscriptions is termed Primitive Irish. The transition to Old Irish, the language of the earliest sources in the Latin alphabet, there are two main schools of thought among scholars as to the motivation for the creation of ogham. The Roman Empire, which ruled over neighbouring southern Britain, represented a very real threat of invasion to Ireland. With bilingual ogham and Latin inscriptions in Wales, however, one would suppose that the ogham could easily be decoded by anyone in the Post-Roman world. The argument is that the sounds of Primitive Irish were regarded as difficult to transcribe into the Latin alphabet, so the invention of a separate alphabet was deemed appropriate. In fact, several ogham stones in Wales are bilingual, containing both Irish and British Latin, testifying to the contacts that led to the existence of some of these stones. A third theory put forward by the noted ogham scholar R. A. S. Macalister was influential at one time, but finds little favour with scholars today. According to this theory, the alphabet was transmitted in oral form or on wood only, the supposed links with the form of the Greek alphabet that Macalister proposed can also be disproved. Macalisters theory of hand or finger signals as a source for ogham is a reflection of the fact that the signary consists of four groups of five letters, with a sequence of strokes from one to five. A theory popular among scholars is that the forms of the letters derive from the various numerical tally-mark systems in existence at the time

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Gothic alphabet
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The Gothic alphabet is an alphabet for writing the Gothic language, created in the 4th century by Ulfilas for the purpose of translating the Bible. It is completely different from the Gothic script of the Middle Ages, Ulfilas is thought to have consciously chosen to avoid the use of the older Runic alphabet for this purpose, as it was heavily connected with heathen beliefs and customs. Also, the Greek-based script probably helped to integrate the Gothic nation into the dominant Greco-Roman culture around the Black Sea, below is a table of the Gothic alphabet. Two letters used in its transliteration are not used in current English, the Runic þ, as with the Greek alphabet, Gothic letters were also assigned numerical values. When used as numerals, letters were written either between two dots or with an overline, two letters,

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin …

Image: Cardinal vowels Jones x ray

The authors of textbooks or similar publications often create revised versions of the IPA chart to express their own preferences or needs. The image displays one such version. Only the black symbols are part of the IPA; common additional symbols are in grey.

World distribution of the Arabic alphabet. The dark green areas shows the countries where this alphabet is the sole main script. The light green shows the countries where the alphabet co-exists with other scripts.

The Unicode Consortium (UC) and the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) collaborate on the Universal …

Image: Writing systems worldwide

Image: Apple Chancery 1¼Fraction Example

A more elaborate example of fraction slash usage: plain text “4 221⁄225” rendered in Apple Chancery. This font supplies the text layout software with instructions to synthesize the fraction according to the Unicode rule described in this section.